The Resolute
by SethNightlord
Summary: Riku is a normal guy, thrown into a zombie outbreak and picks up some stragglers along the way. After rescuing Kairi and Axel, Riku searches for safety in a world overrun by a zombie virus. All Riku really wants is some normalcy and a good gun. RikuxSora
1. Chapter 1

The Resolute

My legs carried me as fast as I could convince them to go. My body ached and was weary—lacrosse practice had only just begun. A gallon of sweat had soaked into my shirt and chest pads. My lacrosse stick was slick in my grasp as sweat lubricated my fingers. Practice had barely started when those junior-year fucks had dicked the whole team over by showing up late to practice.

Coach didn't appreciate lateness, in fact, he hated it so much that in order to teach the late comers a lesson, he gave the whole team a running practice. I know-yadda-yadda-yadda-your sport is our punishment and all that crap, but for god sakes, I run track and cross country but only to keep me in shape for lacrosse. Those long track and cross country practices came in handy though, I was probably in the best running shape of all the players on my team. Three guys were already doubled over and vomiting, the unusual heat and the long hour of running had taken its toll.

I stared up at the spring sun that was for some reason, shining very brightly today. It had been a hellish day all around, my parents had just left this morning for my aunt's. She was having her first child any day now and as a single mother, she wanted my mother—her older sister—to be there for her. I'd been left behind due to an upcoming lacrosse game and not being able to afford to miss any school. I needed to keep my grades high in order to get that full scholarship to Cornell. I was a moderately smart guy when I applied myself, but I really shone on the lacrosse field and Cornell had noticed that. But back to my crappy day—I had gotten a math test back with a B+ , a good grade, but not a perfect grade. And I needed perfect. Then those fucks had gotten the whole team a running workout and once this was over I'd have to go home and make dinner.

Coach had us running a big loop around all the fields behind out high school and this makeshift path took us right along the edge of the woods surrounding the back of our school. As we passed close by I smelled something really rank that burned the inside of my nostrils and made me start coughing. The burning in my chest increased and I ran faster to get away from the smell, eventually forgetting about it.

I chucked my reheated pizza on the kitchen table and turned on the TV. I'd just gotten out of the shower and was starting to enjoy this whole 'you're on your own now' thing. I kicked my shoes off and put my feet on the table as I tilted my chair back and started eating my pizza. The picture on the screen was actually pretty fuzzy and my brow furrowed at this. I stood up and thumped the top of the TV experimentally—which probably did no good seeing as how it was a thin flat screen. The picture flickered twice, then suddenly fizzled out. I tried pressing the power button and flipping through the channels but every channel was full of static. I shrugged my shoulders. That's the problem with these digital cable satellites every time there's a fucking solar flare, the picture goes.

I sighed and flopped back into my chair with a sigh and started plowing through my pizza. I demolished one slice and grabbed another without bothering to reheat it. I tapped my foot along to an imaginary beat in my head and absentmindedly flipped through the mail I had brought in earlier. A piece of saucy cheese feel on my sweat pants and I cursed under my breath. These were my favorite sweat pants and suddenly this night was turning into a shit show. I took my pizza with me to the laundry room to search for a clean pair of pants. I ended up taking a pair of jeans out of the dryer, they were a little snug on me but I liked to hold the disillusioned belief that they made my ass look good. I put the pizza down on top of the dryer and switched my pants. The pizza went back into my mouth as I went to the bathroom to soak my stained sweatpants. That stain was probably never going to come out.

With a sigh, I picked up a hair tie that I must have knocked onto the floor, it had been lounging on the bathroom sink—it was probably my mother's, she was always leaving her shit around in weird places. I stepped out of the bathroom and did a double take, I thought I saw something moving outside out of the corner of my eye. I moved closer to the window in the hall and peered out into the darkness. The sun still sets pretty early so soon into the spring. I could see nothing out there and nothing else moved so I walked back into the kitchen. We had a lot of deer around here so that was probably what I had seen, a deer hopping across the backyard. The TV still showed static and I lowered the volume instead of turning it off, because it was just too quiet here all alone with out any white noise.

My backpack sat on the kitchen counter and my mother would have killed me if she'd seen it there on her marble countertops. The kitchen was decorated in cherry wood and white marble, my mother has a thing for red and white, and from the kitchen I could see into the sitting room with the flat screen TV. The kitchen and sitting room were situated in the back of the house, up against the woods. We weren't exactly in the country, our neighbors were a stone's throw away from us but the woods behind out house made it seem like we were secluded. I drank some water out of a water bottle and finished off my second slice of pizza. I tended to be hungry after practice and even hungrier after a running practice, so I grabbed a third slice of pizza.

I ate this third slice of pizza slower than my other two, I wasn't as hungry for this third slice, so I could actually taste it as it was going down instead of inhaling it. I absentmindedly scratched my leg, picking at an old healed-over scab that was about to fall off. My phone suddenly vibrated, surprising me out of my oblivious state; I picked it up before it managed to vibrate itself off the table. It was my mother, telling me to behave and not throw any raging parties while she and my dad were away. That made me snort, thinking about partying made me groan in fatigue, my muscles screaming at me already even though I had already taken a blazing hot shower. I was in the middle of texting my mother back when I heard something strange, it almost sounded like a woman screaming. I jerked my head up from the phone and looked at the TV, expecting to see the cable back on.

There was nothing but static playing across the screen. I looked out the glass sliding door a few feet away from me and got up to lock it; there was nothing but darkness outside the door and I didn't want to turn the outside lights on. The front door had never been unlocked, I came in the through the garage today. We have an keypad-controlled garage door that we use instead of house keys because my mother and I are so scatterbrained, we kept losing them. I took another bite of my pizza and finished my text to my mother, telling her I was fine when I heard something strange. I couldn't even describe it. It was just a noise that grabbed my attention, there may not have even been a noise, who the fuck knows. I pushed my phone into my back pocket and slipped a sweatshirt on. A shiver still went down my spine and I shoved my feet into my sneakers and moved from the kitchen table to the sitting room. I settled into our comfy sofa, the muscles in my arms still tense from the strange noise I had heard. I took another bite of the pizza but it was tasteless in my mouth, so I chewed quickly and put the plate down. I eased back onto the sofa and some of my tension faded away. Our sitting room was also done in shades of red and my mother had given it a slight Asian theme. Okay, slight might have been an understatement. She was 100% Japanese and took pride in her heritage, there were kanji on the walls that meant strength and wisdom (I think) and some old family heirlooms lining the mantle over the fireplace.

There was an old fan framed and hanging up over the television with a painting on it that was so faded, that it was unidentifiable as anything other than discoloration from water damage. Some cracked vases were lining the mantle that had survived some earthquake or another by being carried out of a collapsing shrine by my great-great-great grandmother. There were countless other ancient nicknacks lying around that my mother loved to death, but my favorite by far, was the ancient 200-plus-year old katana hanging above the fireplace that was forged by the best blacksmith of the time. The wrapping about the handle was frayed due to long years of use and there was some nicks and chips along the metal itself. Ironically, it still looked like shit and my mother had recently taken it to a master restorer who had shined, sharpened and rewrapped part of the handle. She'd paid a pretty penny for that too. The sword was probably priceless with the way my mother treated it; it had been handed down through my mother's family for decades and she loved it fiercely. I stared at the static on the TV and tried to settle down. I was actually debating getting up and getting some ice cream when I heard a scratching sound from outside.

I jumped up just in time to see someone come crashing through my glass-sliding door. I let out a curse and a choked laugh at the belief that someone would actually run into a paneled glass door. I moved forward to go help the person who'd just run through my door.

"Hey, buddy-what the fuck?" I asked. The person lying on my kitchen floor had glass sticking out of all parts of their body and they had already made a pool of blood and other gore on the wood floor. There was something unnatural about the way their arm was positioned and there were chunks of skin and hair on the floor. It was like the person in front of me was falling apart. I leaned closer to investigate when the person suddenly grabbed my ankle and knocked me off my feet with the force of their yank.

"Fuck!" I yelled as they yanked my feet out from underneath me with inhuman strength; I looked at the person's face and realized they were missing an eyeball and their skin was a sickly gray pallor. Almost instantaneously I took in the rest of the individual; they were wearing clothes that hung off their body, making it obvious that they were female and it looked like she was _decaying_. She gripped my leg with her good hand and used her broken arm to latch onto my foot and right before my eyes, she started lowering her mouth to my leg. I stayed frozen for a fraction of a second, it looked like she was trying to _bite_ me. My own screaming brought me back and I kicked out at her face with my free foot. My shoe smashed into her face and I heard a sickening crunch as I broke her nose and probably dislodged a handful of teeth.

That didn't stop her; it merely delayed her a second or two before she tried to bite my leg again. I slammed my free foot onto her broken arm and managed to kick free, scrambling backwards. She was making a strange groaning and clicking noise as she tried to breath through her broken nose. The sound of it almost made me hurl but I was way too fucking scared and confused. She started to crawl towards me, opening her mouth in a moan and I got a glimpse of a bloody mouth with clumps of flesh stuck in between the teeth. Her eyes had once been brown, they were now cloudy. Shaking, I reached for the closest thing near me and threw it at her, hoping to slow her down so I could gain a fraction of a second to think. Unfortunately, I ended up throwing a pillow at her and it did absolutely nothing in the way of slowing her down. I jumped up on the couch and as she started trying to stand up, I kicked her hard enough in the chest to send her reeling to the floor. But kicking didn't seem to be stopping her. I needed to fucking rip her goddamn head off or something. I was about to jump over the side of the couch and run for the knives in the kitchen when a silver glint caught my eye.

I ran for the samurai sword, using a wood coffee table as a launching pad to throw myself up high enough to be able to knocked the glass case off the wall were it hung. The glass case hit the floor before I did and shattered; I landed next to it, cut to ribbons on glass that slit my skin. Suddenly, there was a vice grip on my thigh and I scrabbled around in the broken glass for my prize. Victorious, I sat up and slammed the sword home, right between her eyes as she prepared to start disemboweling me.

I sat there and panted loudly as her blood and gore dripped all over me and the wind whispered in through the broken glass door. After a minute or so, screaming rousing me and I pushed her off of me. I turned to the side and promptly vomited up my pizza on my mother's prized wood floors. What the fuck had happened her? Jesus Christ, I had just _killed _someone. Someone who'd been trying to _eat_ me. Someone who had burst in through my glass door like a fucking psychopath, who couldn't feel pain and who was akin to a juggernaut. I ran a bloody hand through my clean silver hair and could feel her blood dripping down my cheek. I was about to pull my cellphone out of my pocket to call the police when I realized I could hear screaming. I got up and stuck my head out of my broken glass door toward the neighbor's house. I could hear woman, maybe a girl, screaming for help.

I stood in the doorway torn; should I call the cops or should I go help my neighbor's? My neighbor's, the people I'd grown up with, who'd watched me when I was young and came to all my parent's Christmas parties? I shook my head, tightened my grip on my mother's antique sword and made up my mind, running out the backdoor and across our backyards to the neighbor's house. Their backdoor was intact, so obviously the cause for their screaming hadn't arrive via the back entrance. I jerked their backdoor open, letting out a sigh of relief that they hadn't locked it. The screaming was coming from the second floor and as I turned the corner and ran up the stairs, I noticed the front door hanging off its hinges, like it had been torn off. I took the stairs two at a time, my once sore muscles animated by adrenaline. I heard a loud thump and a gut-wrenching noise that sounded like the tearing of flesh. There was another horrified scream. I slowed down, realizing that if I barreled head on into a bad situation, I could get myself killed. I peered around the corner into the first bedroom and saw a king-size bed, soaked in blood and chunks of flesh and bone. It looked like someone had been ripped to shreds. I swallowed back rising acid and my eyes followed the trail of gore down the hall and into a room at the end of the hall. I tried to remember as much as I could about my neighbors; they were older people who had adopted a daughter. They used to babysit me and I faintly remember playing with their daughter but they were a little over protective and she was sent to a private school. Since our childhood, I had only seen her in glimpses and passing glances. As I tried to remember her face, I heard a scream and a heavy pit settled in my stomach.

The scream spurred me into action and I ran down the hallway, bursting into the last bedroom, taking only a second to examine the scene before me. A decaying man with his jaw hanging dislocated was advancing on a girl with short red hair. She screamed and swung a heavy physics textbook at her attackers face and he crumpled to the floor. But as I had discovered the hard way, these weird attackers didn't feel pain. The man collapsed to the floor but instantly started crawling towards her, quicker than even I expected.

"Help me!" She yelled, looked up at me, I gritted my teeth and swing my sword like a hockey stick, almost beheading her attacker. He kept crawling towards her, but at a much slower pace. I grimaced and put a foot on his back, slamming him into the ground and using my new advantage point to finish the job I had started. I hacked the guy's head off and dropped the sword before collapsing onto a pink bed.

"What the fuck's going on?" She sobbed at me.

I just shook my head, this was the second person I'd met who was impervious to pain in less than five minutes. This was wrong, there was definitely something going on. I thought quickly and nervously chewed my lip. "Where are your parents?" I asked. "We need to call the police..." I added as an after thought.

As soon as I mentioned parents, she started screaming in little fits. I looked over at her and it was like I wasn't myself. I didn't feel the pain or hysteria coming off of her, it was like I had no compassion. It was probably shock setting in. I pinched myself hard on the arm and spurred myself into action. I pulled my now bloody cell phone out of my pocket and dialed 911. It rang twice before a message saying the lines were flooded came on and told me to press zero if it was an emergency. I was about to press the button when over the girl's hysterics I heard a shuffling noise. I hung up the phone. I got up and left the room so I could hear better but not before I picked up that sword, if it was another one of those _things_ I wanted to get it before it got me. Stopping just outside the doorway, I tried to mentally cancel out the noise that girl's freak out was causing when I heard the sound of nails raking against wood. I hadn't noticed earlier but one of the doors had a chair underneath the doorknob, preventing anyone from leaving the room. But didn't the door open into the room? The chair was useless... I walked down the hall and stood before that barricaded door; the raking stopped for a second before the sound of a body being thrown against the door started. I was uneasy.

"Hello..." I called out. There was no response. I kicked away the chair blocking the knob and suddenly the crying girl was there. She threw herself against the door propping her body to lay against the door, screaming and cursing at me, yelling at me to put the chair back. I obliged and jammed the chair under the door before whoever was on the other side realized that the chair had been removed at all. After I jammed the chair back in place, she started quietly sobbing to herself. I stared at the door hinges and realization dawned on me, for some reason, this door swung open into the hallway. That chair _was_ keeping someone in.

"Who's in there?" I asked, voice barely above a whisper.

"Some _fucking_ thing!" She bit out harshly, her breathing was ragged and she remained on the floor at my feet, like her muscles weren't strong enough to support her weight. She looked like a fucking mess; she was still in her private school uniform but it was stained with blood and the skirt was torn. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying, her hair stuck to her face from her drying tears.

"How many of them attacked your house?" How many of these things were out there, I wanted to ask. But she didn't have the answer to that question. I wanted to ask her so many questions but I knew she couldn't answer the ones that boggled my mind the most. What was going on? Who or what were these things that were barely people?

This question set her off in a sob-scream and I had to wait a few minutes for her to calm down. This time, I slide down the wall sitting the ground next to her, rubbing her on the back as she screamed her heart out. I kept one ear peeled, listening for any sound besides us and the thing on the other side of the door. Finally, she rubbed her eyes and nose on her sleeves. "One of those _things_ attacked my mother. She... she was sleeping in bed. She'd been feeling bad. She was _fucking sick_! And that thing!" She started screaming and pointing at the barricaded door. "That thing ripped her to pieces! We heard her screaming and my father and I ran up the stairs when we found her...she...Daddy—he pulled that _thing_ off her and it _bit_ him. Bit him! We locked it into the bathroom and left it there. My father ran back to my mother and I tried to call the police... but they were busy. Then I heard this snapping noise...

It was my father, he was eating my mother! He was chewing her bones and I screamed. He turned and saw me and I just screamed... and Daddy why! It just... he was fine one minute and wrong, just wrong, the next.

He came after me and I had to hit him and he wasn't my Daddy anymore, he was a monster. He ate my mother and tried to eat me. It was like he turned into one of those things after it bit him..." She trailed off and we sat there rocking together, her from the sadness of losing her surrogate parents, me trying to stave off the terrible thoughts that I had killed two people tonight.

After a few minutes I stood up and brought her with me. "Come on, come back to my house. The police can't help us right now and there's no cable... I have the feeling that we're not the only ones having trouble tonight." I tugged her along after me and she followed obediently like a sniffling and sobbing puppy. As we walked past the bed that held the remains of her mother, she shuddered and buried her head into my dirty t-shirt. Only the sound of the scrabbling on the wooden door followed us.

We went out the back door, I thought we should stay as far from the street as we could; I peered out at the darkness between our backyards for a few minutes before making my mind up, we had to go now. "Hey, girl..."

"Kairi." She supplied.

"Riku." I replied. "We're going back to my house, it's just right there. We're running—I don't want one of those fucking _things_ seeing us." She nodded in understanding. "Ok, I'm going to hold your hand and on the count of three, run as hard as you can." We were neighbors but our houses seemed miles apart at the moment. I counted out loud and on three, I grabbed her hand and took off running, almost dragging her behind me. My heart was pounding in my throat making the thirty second run feel like a thirty minute run, I could hear Kairi rasping along as she tried to sprint with me. I felt bad but I sure as hell didn't slow down. I dragged her to the back door and ran through without stopping, all the glass was gone anyway. I stopped running and dropped Kairi's hand. She bent double, struggling to inhale air. But I had to be certain we were safe here. I grabbed Kairi and put a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound of her breathing. "Quiet down for a second!" I whispered. She nodded against my hand and held her breath for a few seconds. The house was still and didn't utter a sound. "Ok." I sighed.

I dropped my hand from her mouth and she sagged down onto my couch, shuddering when she saw the dead girl who decorated my wood floor. She looked up and stared at the broken glass and the headless girl. "What happened to you," she asked. "How did you know to come save me?

It took me a few minutes to start my short story. "I was sitting here... eating when it—she came through my glass sliding door. She grabbed my legs and tried to bite me but I grabbed my Mom's antique sword and..." I let her fill in the blank on the last part, I couldn't bring myself to say that I'd stabbed and killed someone. "Then, I heard you screaming and I ran over—your parents used to baby-sit me and I figured that maybe someone was attacking you guys too." I supplied lamely, I hated to bring up her dead parents to her. Adopted or not, they were—had been—her family.

We sat in silence. "Thanks for saving me." She said. I nodded. "But what do we do now? Are there more of those things out there? We're not safe here are we?"

"I just want to know what's wrong with them..." I answered. "Hold on, my mom might be able to help, she's a doctor." I quickly dialed my mom's number and got her voice mail. I left a short cryptic message, "Mom, it's Riku. Call me back when you get this message—you won't believe what happened..." I dialed my Dad too, who was an ex-Marine, it went straight to voicemail for him as well. I snapped the phone shut with a sigh, still no answers.

"Where are your parents?"

"At my Aunt's house—they left this morning. I've been alone here." I replied.

"Rikue, we need to leave here. What if there are more?" Kairi asked, her voice range bordering on hysterical.

"But where would we go? They could be everywhere. They could have overrun the entire town—the entire eastern sea board by now." I groaned, cradling my head.

"I don't know—I just don't want to stay put, I feel like we'll die if we stay put."

"Look, we don't even know if there are anymore of those _things _out there. For all we know these could have been the only two people who were fucking attacking other fucking people. What if we're over reacting? This doesn't have to be some big epidemic Kairi—maybe these guys just got rabies or some fucking weird disease like that and it made them crazy..." I trailed off.

Kairi turned and glared at me, her eyes bloodshot from crying. "Rabies takes a while to show any effect, it doesn't happen instantly, like with my Dad! That's not rabies! And it could very well be an epidemic! If even one other person was walking around like these two and got into a house—infecting a family—they'd become one of _them_ too. And then the infected keep infecting and within hours the entire town could be overrun!"

I sighed, she had a point, off in the distance I heard a chorus of screams. Our eyes met and she jumped up. "Ten minutes," I replied. "We are going to pack everything we need in ten minutes. I don't know if you want to go back to your house and get anything but in ten minutes I am getting in my parent's Explorer and driving away." She nodded in understanding. "I'm going to grab some essentials—my parents have this house stocked—but you might want to grab some clothes." Another scream interrupted me, closer sounding than the last one. "Scratch that, borrow my mother's clothes; you're almost the same size." She nodded again, her eyes wide from fear. She'd never been in a situation like this before—not that I ever had either—but I'd inherited my father's steady demeanor in times of trouble. "You're going to pack the truck with nonperishable food—or just any food you can get your hands on that doesn't need to be cooked. I'm going upstairs to get the rest of what we're going to need." I propped open the garage door with my book bag and grabbed the keys off the counter, pressing the unlock button before I ran upstairs—sword still in hand.

I ran into my parent's bedroom and raided their closet. My dad had stored a lot of his old Marine stuff in there. I grabbed two huge duffle bags and two heavy duty sleeping bags. There was a first-aid kit in the bathroom that went into the pile—my mother being a doctor, it was pretty well stocked. I ripped open some of my mother's dresser drawers and grabbed clothes for Kairi, including some underwear and a pair of sneakers—for the life of me I couldn't remember if she was even wearing shoes. There was a lockbox under my dad's side of the bed that I snatched up and quickly unlocked. In it was a gleaming black glock hand gun. I checked the clip to make sure it was fully loaded and checked the safety before I tucked it into the waistband of my jeans, at the small of my back. Better safe than sorry, my dad always said. Besides, I knew how to fire a gun, my dad was a Marine and had been a cop before retiring a year ago. He'd always made a big deal about me learning fire arm safety and learning how to use a gun correctly had been a high priority for him. There was another fully loaded clip of ammo in the box and I stuffed it into my back pocket. I grabbed the other duffle bag and sprinted to my room, shoving a pair of jeans, t-shirt and sweatshirt into the bag before grabbing my emergency money from the hidden stash in my underwear drawer. When I'd made an emergency money stash, I figured it be used incase I forgot to get someone a birthday present. A rabies epidemic hadn't crossed my mind. I looked my room over once more and grabbed my laptop on a second though, dislodging the video game case on top of it. The case feel to the floor and I froze.

The game was face down but I knew what it was. It was Call of Duty. I couldn't tear my eyes from the images on the back cover—it was a video game about World War II and the pictures on the back triggered something in my memory. Some thing about the game reminded me of what had happened to us and I shivered, shaking it off. Right now, I didn't need the strange sense that I was missing something. I went back to my parents room and started stowing everything into the duffle bags. I slung the bag over my back and ran back down the stairs with them. Kairi was packing cans of food into plastic bags she must have found some where. She saw me coming and ran ahead of me to stash what must have been the last bag of food, into the back of the truck. I tossed the duffle bags and sleeping bags into the trunk and looked down at Kairi's feet. She was shoeless. "I packed you some shoes." She nodded. "Get in the car unless you can think of anything else we need." And in a flash she ran back into the house.

I looked around the garage and saw my dad's survival pack on top of his tool box. I chucked that in too, god forbid if we needed to go into it. That would mean that for some reason we had no other supplies left. I grabbed a case of water bottles from the refrigerator in the garage and ran back into the kitchen. Kairi almost collided with me. She had a knife in her hand and two rolls toilet paper. I raised an eyebrow at her.

"Fuck you, I have priorities." She said. I didn't say anything but gestured to the car. We both hopped into the car. The samurai sword within arms reach in the passenger seat next to Kairi. She settled in and I turned the car on. Over the rumble of the powerful engine, I heard the sound of someone throwing themselves against the garage door. Kairi whimpered and clutched the door of the truck. She pressed a button to lock all the doors and I opened the garage with the remote in the car, preparing myself for the worst.

Someone launched themselves at the back of the truck and I glanced in the rearview mirror for a second before throwing the truck in reverse and stomping on the gas. Who ever had jumped on the truck lost their grip and was run over by the front tires before I even cleared the driveway. Kairi groaned at the sickening crunch of bone. I reversed on to the street in front of our houses and sat idling for a second—staring at the destruction before us. The houses further down the street were being over run by people running and screaming—I couldn't tell who was infected and who wasn't but I had a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Kairi started screaming when people down the street noticed us. They began running towards us and from the nature of their gait we could both tell that they were infected. They just didn't move right. They kind of jerked around—like their limbs weren't functioning right.

I quickly reversed and made a U-turn, going up onto the lawn across from us and then heading down the street away from the mayhem behind us. "Well that settles that." I said with a sigh.

"Huh?" Kairi asked.

"It may not have been an epidemic before, but it's becoming one damn quick."

"How could this all have happened so quickly?"

"I don't know."

"How could they all get rabies so fast?"

"Kai—I don't think they have rabies." I came to a realization—I knew what they were. "They're fucking zombies."

"Zombies?"

"You see, Call of Duty has this mini-side game thing with zombies—you shot zombies, grey shambling guys with their flesh hanging off and their limbs hanging. They don't feel pain but they try to eat you and they can't talk...only groan." I could see her processing all this information in her head and I expected her to tell me I was nuts from playing so many video games. But she didn't say anything like that.

"Have you ever won the game?" She asked.

My mouth twisted into a grimace. "You can't win the game—you have only so much ammo and there's an infinite number of zombies."

We were quiet for a while before Kairi turned on the radio and started flipping through stations. A lot of the stations were static but there were some people broadcasting still.

"-undead. They seem impervious to pain and won't stop unless beheaded. Do not let them bite you! I repeat—_Do not_ let them bite you! A bite from the undead will instantly infect you and within minutes to hours you will become one of them. This is Axel McShane, broadcasting to you, live, from the WRXN station.

I've been getting calls almost nonstop about strange people attacking and eating people. These aren't people anymore though-they're the undead! They're the reanimated corpses of our loved ones. Zombies, people.

It's you or them. They will try to eat you and you must defend yourself or you'll become one of them. No official statements have been released from the government yet but don't count on the army coming to bail us out any time soon. We're not the only ones getting attacked; across the entire country, the dead are walking."

"I know him." Kairi said. "He went to my school...why is he still broadcasting? Why doesn't he leave too?"

"Maybe he's crazy." I replied.

"No," Kairi shook her head. "I'm going to call him." She motioned for my cell phone and I shifted a little so I could grab it from my back pocket. She deftly dialed a phone number and held the phone to her ear, waiting for Axel to pick up.

"Axel—it's Kairi. No! I'm fine. I'm with my neighbor—long story, we're getting the hell out of here. Do you want to come with?" I shot a glance over at her and she pointedly ignored me. "Turn down this street," she told me and I made a sharp turn to the left, following her directions. "We'll be there in ten minutes. Be ready." She hung up and handed me back my phone, I tucked it in my pocket, reluctant not to have it on my person at all times. We couldn't afford to lose our only phone.

I was silent.

"He graduated a year ago and his parents died in a car crash last year—he has no one. We became good friends when he tutored me in Chemistry in the fall."

"Why is he still at the station?"

"No car—no way to get away."

I nodded from what I'd heard, the station was pretty secluded, surrounded by woods—Axel probably hadn't even been attacked yet. Kairi continued to give me more directions, there were few other cars on the street and most of the houses were dark. We raced past about five zombies on our way to the station, we were taking less urban streets to avoid most of the mess. She pointed to a driveway, partially obscured in the darkness by bushes. The headlights lit up the driveway but didn't reveal any zombies. I pulled up in front of the broadcast station, my wheels spinning gravel. I looked around anxiously, not wanted to be stop until I was sure there was nothing threatening in the nearby vicinity. My senses were on high alert and I tried to peer past the headlights into the darkness. Suddenly, there was a knock on my window and I jumped. It was a normal looking guy with spiky red hair and green eyes. Kairi unlocked the door and he jumped in behind me.

"Holy fuck! Kairi, thank you for coming to get me!" Axel cried. "And you must be Kairi's knight in shining armor!"

Axel turned to me but Kairi started crying hysterically again and Axel convinced her to come sit in the back of the truck with him. I turned around and drove out of the driveway with only one destination on my mind. The Summersville Gun and Ammo Supply Store. My dad is a frequent shopper there. Kairi sobbed into Axel's chest and I glanced back in the rearview mirror at them. He looked up and met my eyes—green locking with blue. I broke contact to look back at the road ahead, I was driving over fifty mph on these windy side roads and then through residential streets, where I picked up speed. I noticed Axel hadn't come into the truck empty handed, he'd brought a metal baseball bat with him. I couldn't help myself, I smirked at the thought of how much damage I could do with that thing. I pulled the truck to a stop in front of the ammo store, there were one or two zombies hanging around in the parking lot but the payoff for going inside completely outweighed the risks in my mind. A hero needs his weapons.

Kairi stopped sniffling long enough to ask me what we were doing here. "We need weapons." I replied.

"I don't know how to shoot a gun..." Kairi whispered.

"Me either..." Axel agreed.

"It's a simple as point and shoot." I deadpanned.

"Where the fuck did you find this guy?" Axel whispered loud enough for me to hear. Kairi elbowed him in the stomach.

"I'm going in. Someone is coming with me and someone is staying in the truck ready to drive. Which one of you is doing what?" I asked. I was getting antsy with all the zombies wandering the parking lot. They had noticed us and were staggering over, they looked like they had somehow broken their legs and were staggering towards us at a slow pace. But something told me that other—more agile zombies might soon be on us.

"I'm going in with you." Axel said, "I can carry more stuff than Kairi." I nodded, it sounded like a logical decision. He turned to Kairi. "Lock the doors when we leave but be ready for when we come out. If they get to the car start driving around or something."

"No," I said. "Here." I pulled the gun out from my waistband and handed it to her.

"I don't know how to use this!" She held it away from her pointed down.

"It's easy, point and shoot. I clicked the safety off and jumped out of the truck, Axel and Kairi followed suite. Kairi ran around the truck and jumped into my seat almost before I'd gotten out of the way. I reached over her and grabbed the sword. I wasn't about to leave that thing behind—it had saved my life too many times today already.

Axel grabbed his bat and raised an eyebrow at my sword. "Jesus, what the fuck do you need an ammo store for, your stocked dude!"

"You don't play enough Call of Duty do you?" He shrugged at me. "Limited ammo, infinite number of zombies." I replied as if that answered his question. It must have because he jogged towards the door looking at the shambling zombies coming towards us. He tried to open the door but it was locked. He turned to me as if to give up. "The bat." I answered. He looked at the bat as if he'd really just seen it for the first time and didn't know how it got in his hand. I was about to tell him to hurry up when he lifted the bat and swung it into the glass of the front door. It cracked and he swung again causing the glass window to shatter and cave in. He reached through the broken window and opened the door from the inside.

"This is probably the most illegal thing I have ever done." He replied and I just nodded my head at him, keeping an eye on my shambling friends who were coming ever closer. They didn't look too bright and were actually pretty overweight which made them exceptionally grotesque zombies. We walked into the ammo store and I cast a glance over my shoulder at Kairi before we went in, she was sitting in the driver seat, clutching the gun so tightly her knuckles were white. I felt bad leaving her all alone but all three of us going in wasn't a smart idea; it would leave us trapped in the ammo store. Axel went in first, peering around the small store, his bat up. He motioned that it was empty and I stepped in, sweeping my eyes over the guns hanging on the walls and the ammo lined up in the showcases. It was so easy.

"Grab what I tell you to and take as much ammo as you possibly can." I said.

"Right-o Captain." Was his smart aleck reply.

I jumped over the counter in one swift move even though my sore muscles protested, I grabbed a shot gun and told Axel to grab a rifle and some ammo. I figured he would at least be able to tell the difference between a hand gun and a rifle. I swung the shot gun under my shoulder and tucked my sword into one of my belt loops as a makeshift sheath. I started lining up shot gun ammo on the counter and grabbed a tiny handgun and its ammo, figuring Kairi could probably handle it. I started picking more weapons off the wall, the snipers were left behind—they just weren't worth their weight, but the hunting rifles, I was glad to have. I bypassed the fancy weapons in favor of tried and true classics that I remember my father mentioning to me. When I was done I had two shot guns slung over my shoulder and a hand gun tucked into my waistband and a rifle in the left. I thought I was armed to the teeth until I saw a wicked looking knife that I tucked into another belt loop—it also screamed 'Kairi' at me. I had a pile of ammo in front of me that Axel swept into a huge bag he'd found. He had huge rifles over one shoulder and had a revolver in his other hand.

We looked at our hoard and then at each other and laughed. Then one of the parking lot zombies pounded on the window, trying to get into the door we'd closed behind us. Axel paled and I looked at him. "I'll take this one." I said with reluctance, I didn't want to kill more people but it was necessary.

"No, I need to practice what I preach." He said and then he sighted down his revolver on a shaky hand. He squeezed off one shot—it missed—and then another. This one connected and hit the zombie in the cheek. He hit the ground and didn't get back up.

"Nice shot?" I said, unsure of what to say to the guy when his complexion looked so green and pasty. He nodded and squeezed his lips together. I led the way out of the store in time to see Kairi roll down the truck window and empty a clip point blank at the other zombie who had been slobbering on my truck's windows. We ran to the truck and jumped into the back and Kairi slammed on the gas before Axel even got the door closed. I realized a second later why Kairi had been so eager to leave. There were at least five zombies coming into the parking lot right in front of us, they must have been attracted by the sounds of Axel smashing in the window. To avoid the zombies rushing towards us, Kairi swerved off the parking lot asphalt and onto the grass, cutting across the path the zombies were taking. She was breathing in gasps and I think the only thing keeping her from hysteria, was the fact that a lot of her energy was going into concentrating on driving. She was barreling down the street at 70 mph and the needle was creeping higher and higher.

After ten minutes, she started slowing down and her breathing became regular. I crawled into the front seat, leaving my guns behind but bringing my sword with me. "Kairi, take this next turn off and get on the Interstate." I instructed.

"Where are we going?" Axel asked.

"My aunt's," I replied. "She lives out in Bumble Fuck, Nowhere and my parents are there. If there was anywhere that's safe it'd be there. It's a four hour flight but I think it takes a day by car. It's been so long since I've been there..."

"Then how do you know where it is?" Axel asked.

"I know the address and general directions, when we get to the point where the directions run out we can start worrying."

Axel was silent but Kairi spoke up. "It's not like I have any where to go, so I'm in." She brushed a piece of brains out of her hair and turned on to the Interstate.

"I'm in too—I owe you guys."

Kairi slammed on the brakes, the Interstate was backed up from the ramp and we could see overturned vehicles and car fires lighting up the night sky. There was screaming and moaning and I could see people climbing over the cars. From this far away it was impossible to tell who was who. Who was zombie and who was living. It looked like all hell had broken lose, it was like the rush hour traffic jam from hell. "What do I do?" Kairi asked.

"Turn around and keep driving down the road we came from, we'll take side roads. There are less people, there should be less zombies..." I sounded so sure of myself but I had no idea where I got all this confidence from. Kairi continued to drive, constantly heading north until I noticed her getting groggy. We switched spots and she laid down, wrapped in a cocoon by one of my sleeping bags. We had passed very few other people and cars. We'd met one family heading down south and Axel gave them his revolver with ammo. They would need it more than we would. The scenery around us was unchanging and I sighed in relief when I saw a sign for a gas station.

"Thank God, we were almost on empty." I said and Axel nodded, he'd been quiet, which I'd gathered wasn't his usual persona. He seemed like a chatty guy but I figured he was silent for a reason. There'd been five minutes of small talk where I told him I was Riku Collins and he told me a bit about himself. It felt like we'd known each other longer, since that intimate moment we shared in the ammo store when he'd killed that zombie. I turned off the main road onto a side road that I followed for almost five miles. There was a quant little gas station at the end of the road that had a car or two parked in the parking lot but it seemed deserted.

"Let's do this fast, I want to get something done today that doesn't involve beheading someone." I said, sadly, there was not even a sarcastic note in my voice.

"That reminds me," Axel spoke for the first time in about three hours, his voice raspy from disuse. He cleared his throat and continued on. "When we were in the ammo store, I shot that zombie in the face and he didn't get back up. I know I'd been saying on the radio that they needed to be beheaded...but maybe you just need to destroy their brains. What about their hearts? Have you shot one in the heart yet?"

I shook my head, I'd only beheaded my zombies and stabbed in the head... it was the only way I knew for certain they wouldn't get back up. " He shrugged his shoulder in response and I pulled up to a gas pump. I pulled some money out of my back pocket, the way most gas pumps were set up, you had to pay the machine first to get the gas, making it harder to steal. "I'm pumping the gas, you cover me." I said, hopping out of the car. I started pressing buttons and a message flashed across the screen that said pay inside. I turned around and opened the truck door, sticking my head in. "I have to go inside to pay, I'll be back—leave the car running until I get back." He nodded and rolled down his window, angling his body so he had a clear view of the door leading into the mini mart where I had to pay. The door to the shop was hanging off its hinges and I had a terrible feeling in my gut about that. I grabbed the shot gun and a few bullets, leaving my sword behind for the first time tonight—probably not a good idea, that thing had saved my ass too many times already. I started towards the mini mart, cautiously checking my surroundings by sighting down my shot gun, it was impossible to see into the woods beyond the light from a nearby lamp post. I peered into the shop's window and saw nothing moving, I heard nothing. The door was already hanging open so I slipped silently inside, checking behind all the stands and looking down all the aisles. I jumped over the countertop so I could get to the cash register. There was a door to my left that I put my ear to. I didn't hear anything but I wasn't taking any chances, the rest of the shop was clean but who the fuck knew what was behind that door.

I braced my shot gun so that it blocked the door opening, I was weaponless for the moment but from my vantage point and a well placed security camera screen, I could see the parking lot and the shop clearly. There was no movement anywhere. I started poking at the cash register, trying to figure out how to turn the pumps on when I noticed the pump controls on the wall. I pressed the button for our pump and plugged in fifty dollars worth of gas. I figured that would be enough to fill the truck's tank. But my truck got such poor mileage and on the back roads, gas stations were few and far in between. Then, I noticed the section one could select if they knew how much gas their tank could hold, I selected that instead of the money option and typed in my tank's size, this way I could look for a way to get extra gas in case of an emergency. I glanced around and found what I was looking for in one of the boxes behind, the counter—a tank to carry gas in and a tube to run the gas through. I grabbed the stuff for the gas and my shot gun and got out of that mini mart quickly. It gave me a bad feeling how the door was hanging off the hinges. Strangely enough, there were no other signs of trouble. It looked like who ever had been here had been dragged off without much of a fuss. I got back to the truck and started the gas pumping. I opened the driver side door again and told Axel I was going to try and get more gas. He just nodded his head at me and tightened his grip on his gun. Axel had adapted quite quickly to this strange team we'd made, him, Kairi and myself.

I jogged over to one of the cars parked on the outskirts of the lot, it was so strange that they'd been left here—I didn't want to think about it. I opened the gas compartment and took off the lid, putting my tube deep enough into the tank that it would land in any gas in there. I put my mouth on the other end of the tube and sucked until gas flooded my mouth. I sputtered and spat the gas out onto the pavement beside me. The gas started to flow from the tank into by carrier, suddenly there was banging on the window next to me and I jumped back, stumbling over my shot gun. There was a zombie trapped in the car, they must have locked themselves in to escape another zombie and turned before they could drive away. I shuttered at how terrible it was to be trapped inside one's own car, changing into what was hunting you before you could even get away. The poor fuck probably didn't even know what was happening. He probably thought that he was attacked by someone strung out on drugs and didn't think anything of the bite he'd sustained trying to defend himself. It was a damn shame.

I looked back over my shoulder and saw Axel aiming his gun at the zombie in case he tried something funny—honestly, I felt more uncomfortable with Axel aiming that gun near me than I did about the zombie. The gas stopped flowing out the tube and I grabbed the carrier tank, screwing back on the top, my shot gun tucked under my arm as I jogged back to the car. I chucked it in the back towards Kairi and removed the nozzle from the truck's gas tank. It had finished filling a while ago. I jumped back up into the truck's driver seat and restarted the engine, Axel had shut it off while I was siphoning the gas from the other car. Kairi was still sleeping in the back seat and for the first time tonight, I left a stopping place without shooting a zombie or picking up another straggler. I felt accomplished. I drove away, my tank full and more gas stored in the back of my truck—it made me feel much better than it probably should have.

There was quiet in the car, the only thing besides the rumble of the engine was Kairi's heavy breathing. Axel turned the radio on at one point but there was nothing but static and government messages telling people to stay calm and stay home. But we couldn't stay at home—not with all those thing crawling around and my parents out there somewhere. I wasn't going to sit still and wait for those cannibals to come get me.

"It's been hours but it feels like forever." Axel said suddenly, I remained quiet. "One minute, I was sitting in the broadcast room playing shitty pop music and the next, I'm getting calls and texts from my friends wondering if I knew what was going on. They all turned to me, thinking I might know something more, since the government sometimes contacts the station if they need important messages played. But some of my friends contacted me at like, one in the afternoon, wondering if something was going on. I told them nothing had come my way—a few, I thought were playing a practical joke on me. But then, as it got later and later, I got more frantic calls and I started looking all over the internet searching for information. I found a few reports on strange sightings and attacks—they were saying pretty much the same thing on TV. Then the fucking cable goes out and no one knows why. I'm calling the cable help number and no one's answering. My friends who live further away still had cable and were giving me up to the minute updates—up until I left that is. I haven't heard from them in hours.

I couldn't leave the station—I had no car and my apartment's a twenty minute drive. Going outside felt like a fucking suicide mission. I dug up this baseball bat out of the basement but there was literally _nothing else_. No one else was even at the station today. I started broadcasting about the zombies—a little before they hit our town and people were fucking furious. They kept calling me asking me if this was a joke, if I thought I was fucking funny or something. A half an hour later, I started getting different calls—desperate calls. Calls telling me I was right, calls coming from people as they died, wanting to know if I could help them. Then, Kairi called and you guys came and got me. You saved me—I had nowhere to go. I was probably going to die in that fucking station. I left that message playing on the radio—I hope it helps some people, maybe some people got out early, like us."

I laughed, "Axel, I don't think we got out early. Getting out early would mean we wouldn't be _here_. Kairi would be with her parents."

"What happened to her parents, I know they're dead but she was so hysterical, I was afraid to really ask her... She didn't really tell me anything about how you and her met up either."

I was quiet for a second, not really sure how much of the story was mine to tell. Within the past ten hours, I'd been involved in so many people's stories, I'd forgotten where mine began and ended. "I was eating dinner when someone crashed through my door. We struggled a bit before I grabbed my mother's antique sword off the wall and stabbed the zombie in the head. A few minutes later, I heard screaming, went and investigated and found Kairi in her room, using her textbook to defend herself. I beheaded the zombie attacking her. Later, I found out a zombie attacked her mother first—her father and her found it. They managed to lock the zombie in a room but her father got bit. He transformed quickly and started attacking Kairi. That's where I came in."

"Her father...? You killed her father in front of her?" Axel asked.

"I had too. What else could I do? Leave her?"

"No, no. I understand now, I'd be hysterical too if my dad attacked me and someone had to kill him to save me." Axel put his hands over his eyes in a tired manner and rubbed them.

"You could go to sleep. I doubt we'll have any trouble driving around here." I said.

"I can't sleep. I don't know how Kairi's sleeping..."

"I think she passed out from exhaustion. She's had a rough night."

I think we both understood that, but neither of us wanted to settle back into the deafening silence that had once been companionable. It almost felt like talking would keep those fucking zombies away. "What about you? You're like fucking Rambo. How do you know how to siphon gas? And these guns—dude, if I had to pick anyone to survive the zombie apocalypse with, it'd be you."

I laughed at this and Kairi mumbled something from the back seat in her sleep. I lowered my voice a little to respond to Axel. "My dad's an ex-Marine, he taught me all this stuff, told me all these stories—I wish I'd paid attention more. My mom's a doctor and her sister is supposed to be having a baby any day now. She lives out in the country and my parents went out to see her, I was left behind."

"So now we're going to them. Makes sense, if they're really out in the country, than there should be minimal zombies, right? Maybe one or two stragglers, but not too many people who can get bitten and turn."

I laughed bitterly at what we'd come to. Trying to stay as far away from other humans as possible, because where there were humans there were zombies and where there was zombies there was death. We'd been traveling for only ten hours but already I felt far too from home and way too far out of my comfort zone. For the first time in ten hours, I allowed myself to think of all the friends and people I knew back home that could very well not be people anymore. But you couldn't think about those kinds of things—those are the kinds of things that'll kill you my dad says and since he managed to live through Desert Storm, I believe him. If anyone knew how to survive something like this it was my dad and he'd spent years trying to impart that knowledge on me. I tried to call my parents again but their phones still went to voicemail. No service.

End Chapter 1

Author's note – This is highly experimental for I think. And depending on how this story is received, that will determine the further actions I take with it. I wrote all 18 pages of this thing like a madman, I really never once stopped to think about what I was writing, I just kept going. It was like I was possessed. I really don't know how many of you care for zombies but to me they're the most likely 'supernatural monster scenario'. Come on, can't you picture a zombie apocalypse more readily than Edward Cullen?

Now, more importantly to most of you, is the romance. Don't worry—this is only chapter one in what looks like a long story. Sora will hopefully show up in the next chapter and make things a little more light hearted.


	2. Chapter 2

The Resolute

Chapter 2

I sighed, thinking that half an hour ago, I was running loops around a field an infinite number of times. Things had been normal then—not fucked up like they were now. Within twenty-four hours I'd killed at least two people—I'd even run over one or two zombies every few hours I had driven. My sword was at my feet, the blade covered in dried black blood. My mother wouldn't be too happy about that, but hell I didn't feel like cleaning it. Axel was driving with the window open, he'd been smoking one cigarette after another for the past two hours that he'd been driving. Apparently he'd quit smoking but still couldn't drive unless he had one in hand—some nervous habit or something.

Axel tossed his used cigarette out the window. Kairi wasn't too happy about the window being open, she was afraid that the worst would happen. I couldn't blame her, but we were going about seventy and we hadn't seen anyone on this road in a long time. We were making good time but by avoiding highways and main roads, we were going out of our way. Honestly, we were lost at the moment which was why I suggested stopping at the next town. If we couldn't find a map of the tri-state area, there was always the hope we'd be able to get internet on the laptop I'd brought. I cursed myself silently for not thinking of grabbing the old road atlas we had sitting in the garage—it was too late for those kinds of regrets now.

"I have to go to the bathroom." Kairi whispered.

I looked up in the rearview mirror at her, "How long can you hold it?"

"How far are we from this next town?" She replied.

"The last sign said ten miles a few minutes ago. It's not that much further."

"I guess I can hold it but our first priority has to be to find a bathroom..."

"Sure." Axel responded as he lit up another cigarette. "I need more cigs and some fucking coffee or something." I had managed to get some sleep, Axel hadn't. He was too afraid to sleep and if coffee and cigarettes were what he needed to not have a mental breakdown then coffee and cigarettes he'd have. I could not deal with another hysterical person, especially since Axel had done the majority of caring for Kairi when she started crying. Kairi had cried nonstop for two hours straight this morning and it made me feel as me as mentally exhausted as she must emotionally feel. Her eyes were permanently red it seemed and she'd changed clothes—putting my mother's pants and t-shirt on. Luckily my mother was just her size and the clothes fit perfectly. I was also thankful for the fact that Kairi had complained less than the rest of us and she'd probably had the worst day of her life yesterday. Her life had to be a waking nightmare at this point. There was dried brains and blood on her face and in her hair that she hadn't had the chance to clean off. In fact—all of us were disgusting; my white shirt was caked in red and dried blood was flaking off my face. Axel was pretty clean but he had a giant splatter of gore on his left side from when he had shot that overweight zombie in the face. We were a ragtag group but in the time we'd been together, I'd grown relaxed with them. I'd had a lot of friends back home but no real best friends. I'd been a popular guy but I was kind of aloof from everyone because of all the schoolwork always hanging over my head. Being with Kairi and Axel made me feel at home and I knew when we got to my parents, I'd be loathe to let them go.

"I think we might need to stop. We're getting low on gas..." I said, eyeing the needle on the dashboard. We still had food and water but we were filthy and bone tired. I got the feeling that Kairi wouldn't keep quiet for long—she'd eventually start complaining about being filthy, I just wasn't sure if she'd start complaining before me. My jeans were literally plastered to my legs in some places where blood had dried. Killing is a messy messy business and you don't realize how much blood people have until you cut into a major artery and you become coated in the stuff. It was a morbid thought but the three of us—we'd been dealt a morbid hand. According to the few stations still broadcasting, zombies had started to overrun other countries. The zombies were actually thought to be the result of some kind of super virus that had been accidentally developed in Japan and had quickly spread throughout the world. Reports were stating that the more rural parts of the world were much safer than the urban but still more reports telling everyone not to panic and to sit tight. I had laughed at that announcement, from what we could see, the people who stayed put were the ones who were the most fucked. Zombies were drawn to the living like a moth to a flame, they could somehow sense the living through some perverted kind of 'sixth sense'.

A sign flashed past the truck, 'Wainwright – 5 miles'. We'd seen no one for over an hour—living or dead and that made me wonder. Was it possible this little bumble-fuck town in the middle of goddamn nowhere was still safe? I was still following this line of logic when we rolled into the center of the town. Wainwright – population zero. It looked like a ghost town, all the shop windows were boarded up, cars were abandoned on the streets—their doors hanging open. It looked like the whole town had evacuated overnight. I had to raise my eyebrow at that—it was pretty impressive.

"Where is everyone?" Kairi asked, face glued to the window, trying to peer around every corner to get a glimpse of anything. There was a squirrel nibbling on something but not much else.

"Jeez, did this entire town get infected?" Axel asked, letting out a low whistle.

I shrugged my shoulders. "I have no fucking clue; all the windows are boarded up... I don't really like this." Kairi made a noise of agreement and Axels knuckles were white on the wheel. "Maybe this isn't too weird. We haven't been in a town in hours, maybe this is normal."

"But seriously? This entire town looks like it picked up and left. I just don't fucking get it. There's no goddamn way they all got together and said, 'let's all get the fuck outta here'." Axel said, his voice had a warble in it and I felt reassured knowing he was as freaked out by this as I was.

"If there's no one here, than there are no zombies here, right? Maybe we can just stay here for a while..." Kairi said.

I shook my head. "I really don't think we should stay here that long—maybe two hours at the most." I pointed at a diner a little ways down the street. "Let's stop there; they'll have a bathroom and some coffee." We'd been idling a few minutes and I felt pretty confident that anything that could hear us would be trying to eat us already.

"Agreed, I don't even want to stop here. It's giving me the fucking creeps." Axel replied. He drove up to the diner and turned the engine off. We all stepped out of the truck, looking around ourselves cautiously. None of us could shake the feeling that something was wrong here.

"You guys go in, I'll fill up the tank with gas and get some more." Gas had become a big priority of mine on this trip and it was kind of funny how much it was on my mind these past few hours. I took the red carrier tank and filled up the truck; there was still a little gas left sloshing in the carrier but not enough to make me fell comfortable. I siphoned more gas out of one of the cars lying abandoned. On a whim I checked the inside of the car, there was some stuff in it—a purse and some random papers. The keys were still in the ignition and I stared at them for a while as the gas poured into my carrier. It was too fucking creepy that the keys were left in the car like that. I walked around to the other side of the car and noticed the puddle of blood trailing off down the sidewalk; it was just starting to coagulate. There had been someone here recently and they'd been _alive._ I could hear Kairi talking to Axel as their voices were carried to me on the wind. I walked back to the truck and grabbed my sword out of the front seat. The glock rested heavily at the small of my back. I walked back to the recently-abandoned car and followed the trail of blood droplets down a side alleyway between a card store and knitting shoppe. At the end of the alleyway, propped up against two garbage cans, was a young woman with light blonde hair. She was still breathing. Then, I noticed that she was tied to a pole. I ducked back around the corner.

My heart felt caught in my throat and the hilt of my sword was slick in my hand. Rapidly, my mind went through what I seen. A young woman, tied up—bleeding—in an abandoned town. Well, I guess the town's not abandoned anymore. Someone had hurt her and tied her up—for fucks sake—they probably pulled her right out of her damn car. I looked back at the car and realized it was an out-of-state license plate—she was from Massachusetts. I looked back at the girl, her white dress was covered in blood that was still leaking from a jagged slash across her stomach. One of her ankles was twisted and swollen, her white platform heel barely on her foot. I took the glock out of my pants and stepped into the alleyway. The girl stirred at my footsteps and blearily looked up at me before her head slide back down. Anger flared up in my chest that someone had done this to her. I walked down the alleyway and started undoing the knots tying her down; a door banged open behind me.

A large burley man stepped into the alleyway brandishing a shotgun at me. "And what the fuck do you think you're doing with my bait, boy?" He yelled out me. He looked like a fucking psycho hillbilly with his missing teeth and bloody overalls.

"Your bait?" I sputtered out, incredulously.

"What are yah, deaf? I said, what are you doing with my bait, you _mo-ron_!" He spit on the ground at me and I wrinkled my lips in distaste.

"She's your bait? Bait for what?" I asked, keeping my eyes trained on that shotgun.

He waved it around in the air to emphasis his points. "Deaf and ignorant, I see! Don't tell me you haven't noticed those unholy cannibals that the non-believers have turned into."

"Non-believers?" I repeated, not only was I trying to buy time but I was trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about.

"Heretics! Those who don't believe in God! This is it, boy! The second coming. And good Christians like me have been spared turning into flesh-eating demons!" There was a feverish light in his eyes and I started to become very afraid of the raving lunatic in front of me. One wrong word or step and he wouldn't hesitate to shoot me. The girl at my feet moaned and I didn't even spare her a glance.

"Where's everyone else in this town?" I asked, desperate to distract him so I could do _something_. I didn't know what I was going to do but I knew I needed to do something.

"Everyone else, heh! Most of 'em left or turned right away—the rest of 'em—well, I put the rest of 'em to work. They won't be missed anyway. They were bad people, always caring more about money and carnal pleasures than about God. I did 'em all favors! They'll be accepted to heaven now for their sacrifices! God will be so pleased with them—God will be so pleased with me."

"Wait...I don't understand. What happened to everyone else?"

"Well, it doesn't take a genius to realize that the Unholy Ones are attracted by the scent of flesh. But what many people don't realize is that they're like sharks—they can smell blood from a mile away. The streets were pretty much overrun—but I was stocked up in case of emergencies like this." He pointed at the door behind him and figured that he must live over the card store but I also had to wonder what kind of emergencies this guy was expecting. "I realized that as one of the Chosen, it was my duty to rid the town—no the world—of this unholy infestation. I started killing the ones roaming the streets, picking them off with my shotgun—I'm a good shot, if I do say so myself. I ran out of targets pretty right quick and it was too dangerous to go searching 'em out. So I started luring my good-for-nothing neighbors in and used them as bait to 'flush' out the stragglers." I was going to be sick, he was using humans to lure out zombies and I had a feeling that he didn't give a shit what happened to his bait—so long as he got a zombie in the end. It was amazing that this guy's terrible karma hadn't gotten him bitten yet.

"And lucky me—just when I thought I was running out of bait, this here young lady comes driving up, all pretty as can be. All I had to do was wave her down—it was so easy because God had willed it. And now, God has dropped off another gift at my very doorstep." He laughed to himself and then choked on his own spittle as a bullet ripped through his chest. He stumbled and fell forward on top of his shotgun. There was a gurgling noise coming from him and in a fit of fury I fired the glock into his head—five times. I would say I was just making sure he was dead but I wasn't.

Axel stood at the end of the alleyway staring at me, the dead hillbilly and woman tied up at my feet. "I didn't know you were into that kind of stuff Riku." He said motioning his rifle at the woman. He tried smiling but only one side of his mouth went up and I knew he had pretty much reached his mental limits. I was breathing heavily through my mouth.

"We—we have to leave now."

"Huh?" Axel asked, his brain still not functioning properly.

"He's—he's been fucking luring the zombies in. He's been using people as bait to get to the zombies. We have to get out of here. Kairi? Where's Kairi?" I asked, my mid racing and my mouth not totally following along with it.

"She's still at the diner—she—she's washing up..." Axel trailed off.

"Ok. We're getting this lady in the truck and Kairi is getting her ass in the truck now. Go get her and then come back—I'm going to need help." I motioned to the girl who looked barely conscious. Who knew whether or not there were any other zombies left in town—I didn't want to be here when they caught the smell of her blood. Axel ran back to the diner to get Kairi and I started on the knots binding the women's legs together, they weren't coming undone, so I abandoned that avenue to work on the rope tying her to the stake in the ground. The stake looked like it had been hammered into the asphalt and from the size of the dead hillbilly, I knew there was no way I was going to be able to pull it out of the ground. I tugged at the knot before cursing and taking my sword to it. Thank god my mother had it sharpened because it sliced through the thick rope like butter. I sat the girl up straighter on the garbage cans and slapped her lightly on the face. She groaned and her eyes fluttered. She'd lost a lot of blood—I couldn't do anything for her without some medical help.

Further down the alley, I heard a crash and my head jumped up to see a zombie running at me. I grabbed the glock where I'd left it on the floor and shot the zombie—missed the first shot but got it with the second squeeze of the trigger. Its brains exploded and it fell to the floor, never to get back up. I quickly tucked my sword and gun away and turned back to the lady and tried to figure out how to pick her up. I grabbed her under the armpits and decided I was going to have to pull her back to the truck and the thought made my stomach clench—her ankle was almost certainly broken and it would be banging against the ground. I dragged her a few steps before I heard running footsteps behind me. I dropped her against my legs and spun around, shooting the zombie behind me that was a centimeter from reaching me. This wasn't working, in order to drag her I'd have my head facing away from the alleyway's entrance making me vulnerable. Where the fuck was Axel?

I debated yelling out his name—wondering if that would call more unwanted attention to me when Kairi drove the truck up to the alleyway entrance. Axel threw open the door and ran towards me.

"Hurry the fuck up! You wouldn't believe how many of them are coming!" He ran towards me and grabbed her legs. We started carrying her as quickly as we could but she kept moaning as we jostled her. I heard a shot ring out as Kairi cracked open her window to shoot a zombie coming at her.

"Guys! Come one!" She yelled, her voice catching.

I jumped into the truck first and laid the girl down on the floor. Axel followed in, gently placing her legs down. Kairi started driving away and I looked behind us. There were at least ten-plus zombies of all shapes and sizes chasing after the truck. I guess the psycho hillbilly wasn't as good of a shot as he thought he was. Kairi gunned the engine and we roared down the streets, pulling away from the mass. She was heading the wrong way though. I climbed into the front seat, my sword banging against everything and getting stuck. I pulled it through my belt loop and put it in front of me so I could sit down.

"Kai—you have to turn around. You're going deeper into town, you're going the wrong way."

"What do I do?" She cried.

"Turn here, we're going to make a loop around the town, hopefully. We'll go back down the main street—we need to grab the gas carrier anyway." I said.

"It's fucking gas! We can leave it behind!" Kairi yelled.

"No! Do you want to have to fucking walk to my aunt's place? Because they'll be nothing in between us and the zombies then, Kairi!" I yelled back. "We're getting the gas." She said nothing and spun the wheel so we could take the next turn and hopefully loop around. The truck skidded and she almost crashed into a pick-up truck parked in the middle of the street.

"Fuck!" She yelled and cut the wheel so that we took a tighter turn. I could feel that the truck was in danger of rolling.

"Jesus! There's blood all over the fucking place, Riku!" Axel yelled at me from the backseat.

"I know, just apply pressure to the wound—try to stop the bleeding."

"Fuck—alright."

Kairi turned again and we were almost right where we'd been when we were first attacked. The zombies were still behind us but the gas carrier was out in the open with no zombies near it.

"Kai—stop by this car!" She slammed on the brakes and I threw the door open—running full speed to the gas carrier and the tube. I grabbed them and ran back to the truck. A zombie came around the side of the car; it reached for me, nails slicing along my cheek. I ripped my glock out and shot over my shoulder, not even looking. I must have gotten him because he was there one second and gone the next.

I jumped back into my vacated seat and Kairi was pulling away; I had one leg in the truck and put the gas equipment in. I swung the rest of my body in and closed the door. I closed the door on a zombie's hand and cursed colorfully before I opened the door and pushed our hanger-on away. We drove away from the town and the zombies, everything faded into the distance behind us. I sighed in relief as the last zombie disappeared in our dust.

"Shit—Riku, this girl needs help." Axel called out.

"Oh my god, oh my god." Kairi chanted out loud under her breath. I patted her reassuringly on the shoulder before climbing into the back seats, stepping over the bleeding girl on the floor. I reached over the back row of seats for the first-aid kit I had back there. I tugged it over the top of the seat and sat it down on the back row of seats. I loosed the clips and the top came off. I started rustling around until I found a pair of scissors and I tossed them at Axel.

"Cut off her dress—we have to see the wound." I said.

Axel nodded and started cutting the woman's dress off. "I'm so sorry lady—look, if it makes you feel better, I'm gay." He said and the woman let out a gurgling laugh—I don't think she really cared what happened to her now so long as she was out of that psychopath's clutches.

"What the hell happened to her? Was she bitten?" Kairi asked from up front.

"Some fuck was using her and other people as bait to lure in zombies—he was some nut who thought he was doing God's work or some shit like that. And if she'd been bitten—trust me she'd be dead by now." I spat out.

"Why is it that the people with the best intentions always turn out so fucked up?"Kairi asked. None of us answered her, I don't think she was looking for an answer.

"We're gonna need some peroxide or something over here..." Axel called out. I nodded and tossed him a brown bottled labeled as hydrogen peroxide. We were fully stocked—it was just a matter of knowing what we needed to use. "She's lost a lot of blood... your mom didn't back an IV drip did she?" He jokingly asked, deep down, I know he was hoping she had.

"No..." I replied. "But there's a lot of gauze and medical tape in here." I turned around in time to see Axel start pouring the bottles contents onto her stomach.

"Well, what do you have in there?" He asked, getting annoyed.

"Shit—a ton of stuff: needles, tape, gauze, antibacterial crap, band-aids, aspirin, iodine, moist toilettes, gloves, tweezers... uh some bottles of stuff." Axel looked over at me struggling to name everything in my moms first aid kit.

"Jesus, that looks more like an EMS kit or something. It's probably stocked with everything we need. Any novacaine or morphine or something?" He asked.

"Uh..." I found the master list my mother had handwritten and thrown in the bag and quickly read through it. "No, nothing like that."

"What kind of medicine is there?"

"Uhm... apsirin, Mydol, Percocet, Nyquil...some vitamins..."

"Wait!" Kairi yelled, interrupting me. "Percocet! Give her Percocet—it's a strong painkiller, they gave it to me after I got knee surgery when I was younger. Give her two pills, that's how much they told me to take."

"Sounds good to me." I dug around the bag until I found the Percocet bottle and handed two pills to Axel. He started trying to coax her to swallow them while I pulled out more gauze and dressings. Once she got them down, he motioned for some gauze so he could keep cleaning her stomach wound. He scrubbed at it pretty hard but within ten minutes she was so doped up she could barely feel the pain anymore. It became quickly evident how long the gash was. It was like she'd been sliced by someone trying to gut her but they hadn't gone deep enough. Instead, they'd left a half-a-foot long slash in her stomach that was still bleeding.

"We have to close this thing up or she's going to keep bleeding..." Axel said trailing off. "You said needles, what kind of needles?" He asked.

"I'm not sure...not sewing needles." I replied.

"Haven't you gotten stitches before? They don't use a regular sewing needle, they use a curved surgical needle. Look around for one." He commanded and I realized he was right, last year I'd needed a deep cut stitched up on my forearm—I knew what I was looking for.

"I don't think—oh wait, here it is." I handed Axel the surgical needle, still wrapped for sterility. "And here's some thread."

"Ok. Have you ever sewn before?" He asked me.

"Uhm... in Home Ec. class in seventh grade, I was terrible at it." I replied honestly.

"Kairi, you?"

"No, my mother had arthritis in her fingers, she couldn't teach me and I never took Home Ec."

"Shit, I might as well do it. Riku, I'm going to need your help." Axel motioned for me to come over. I knelt beside him, ready for direction. He seemed to have more of a clue about what we needed to do than I did.

He took out the needle and threaded it. "I think I'm supposed to do this using forceps but fuck it—I'm no doctor." I laughed at this and it helped to relieve some of the tension in the truck. The injured woman gurgled, blood foaming at the corners of her mouth. I don't think she knew what was going on anymore, a combination of shock and the painkillers. "You need to help hold her down while I do this, I don't know how much she is going to feel this." I nodded. "Kairi, slow down a little, I don't want want to accidently poke myself in the eye with this thing." Kairi eased off the gas and the truck started to lose speed.

"Ok, here is goes." Axel said. He poured some hydrogen peroxide on his hands to sterilize them and picked up the needle in his left hand, with his right he pinched together the two ends of the cut. The woman made a small moan of pain and I held her down as best as I could. Meanwhile, Axel whispered things at her to keep her calm. He kept talking to her like he wasn't sewing her skin together. When Axel plunged the needle in for the first stitch, the woman kicked her leg out, I felt it jerking underneath me. Deftly, he pulled the needle back out of the skin and sunk it back in. He went as quick as he could to make it easy on her, he wouldn't win any awards for neatness and she'd be left with an ugly scar but it was the best we could do and in the end you'd think she'd just be grateful to be alive. By the time he finished the last stitch, the woman was crying silently, she had a death-like grip on my hand and her legs were tense. Axel swabbed her one last time with hydrogen peroxide after he cut and knotted the thread.

He sat back on his heels with a sigh and shakily wiped some sweat off his brow. All three of us were squished together on the floor. He looked at me and his face was paler than I'd ever seen it before.

"So you're gay, huh?" I asked.

"Uh...yeah." He replied.

"Interesting." I said.

I got up off the lady and went into the last row of seats to grab her a clean shirt since Axel had needed to cut her dress off. Axel sat her up and I gingerly put the shirt over her head and helped her put her arms through it. I tugged it down gently, grateful that Axel had left her bra intact.

"We have to do something about her ankle." I said, pointing to the swollen appendage.

Axel looked at it for a second. "We need to find a way to keep it straight—I'm sure when we get to your mom, she'll be able to do more for her." I nodded. Axel got up and looked through the first-aid kit until he found something suitable. "Damn it—there's nothing long enough or sturdy enough in here."

"I know what we can use." I picked up one of Axel's rifles and took the magazine out.

"Genius!" He proclaimed which made me smile.

He lined the girls leg up with the rifle and then started taping about the rifle and her leg. Really, it was quite ridiculous but it was effective for what we were trying to do. "I think that's all we can do for her now." Axel said quietly. I nodded and picked up her up by the torso and pulled her into the back seat, where I laid her down and positioned her so that her legs were straight. I unrolled one of the sleeping bags and threw it on top of her before sinking down into a seat myself.

Axel and I took a few minutes to calm down and return our heart rates to normal. I hadn't noticed it but my heart had been pounding in my chest like a jackhammer. "Hey man, thanks for saving me." I said clapping Axel on the shoulder. He nodded back and gave me a nervous smile.

"When he couldn't see you kneeling by the car anymore, he got worried and told me to get the truck." Kairi filled me in on how Axel had realized something was wrong.

I nodded my head, Axel was somebody who'd been born to survive. He had a good head on his shoulders and a nose for survival, or so my father would have said. My dad had a way of appraising peoples chance of survival with his eyes. I think when he did that, he was actually trying to gauge how readily the other person would kill someone. It made me shudder because my father had raised me to be a soldier. He'd groomed me for the worst case scenario and had made me a survivor too. Axel and I were born for this type of environment, we could survive in combat. Slowly, I'd come to realize that I'd become more used to the idea that I had killed people. It didn't ride so heavily on my conscious anymore—probably because I'd come to the conclusion that the things I'd been killing _weren't _people anymore. Like the crazy hillbilly had said, they were something evil. And now it was kill or be killed. It seemed like even Kairi was slowly adapting to the living hell that had been her last twenty-four hours. Her eyes were still stained red and her knuckles were white on the steering wheel but she had a better grip on reality, as evident by the concern she showed about the injured woman in the truck.

Kairi looked back at me through the rearview mirror, almost as if she could hear my thoughts and knew I was thinking about her. I looked over at Axel and he was staring at the back of the seat in front of him with a glazed expression. My muscles still ached from that running practice and my head pounded as my lack of sleep started to catch up with me. I watched the trees rush past the truck windows as the sun slowly set on the horizon. Another day over in this living hell. Somehow, I still felt like every time I blinked, I'd wake up to realize that this had all been a horrible dream. I'd wake up in my bed at home—smell my mom cooking breakfast downstairs and ready myself for school and practice. Most importantly—I'd wake up and realize that I hadn't killed anyone, that Kairi's parents were still alive, that this lady's blood wasn't all over me and that Axel hadn't been forced to perform emergency surgery on someone. It was all so _fucked_ up. We were a bunch of kids, God dammit! Kairi and I weren't even out of high school yet. The most hardship either of them had probably ever felt before this was the mile-run they make you do each year in gym. I wasn't much better—sure my body was hardened from numerous years of strenuous activity and I'd learned to be a soldier from my father but I wasn't prepared for this. The worst I had ever had to deal with was a B+ on my math test. This is some bullshit.

"Alright. We're lost. I know neither of you two guys are going to say it but since I'm a girl, I can admit to being lost. I've been driving on this road and I have no damn idea where we are." Kairi slammed her hand on the wheel. "I'm tired of not knowing where I'm going." She had a severe look in her eyes and a strange set to her mouth. Kairi was starting to freak out again, that calm she'd had before was going.

I squinted my eyes and looked ahead, trying discern what I was seeing through the shadows. We weren't on a paved road anymore. It was made of dirt but the make-shift road was pretty compacted down because it was smoother ride than one would expect from a dirt road. "It's alright Kairi, keep following the road. We must be headed towards a farmhouse or something. It's too narrow to turn around here with out risking getting stuck in a ditch... just keep going." It was the best answer I could supply. Axel was still staring at nothing and the lady in the back seat was out cold.

"What happens when we get there?" Kairi asked.

"When we get where?"

"The house or whatever is at the end of this road...if it's safe, can we stay the night?" She asked tentatively and I could see how the idea of a bed or even a couch to sleep on appealed to her. Being in the car for twenty-four hours had given me a permanent crick in my neck. I ached to lie down and stretch my entire body.

"It depends Kairi."

She nodded and flicked the high beams on so she could see, since the sun had set and there were no streetlights on this make-shift road. Eventually, the road started to become more overgrown, I could still faintly see ruts in the road where someone had driven there before. The road didn't look disused, but it looked almost abandoned. It had not seen a lot of traffic lately. I wondered what could be at the end of the road. A farmhouse? Nothing, a dead end? My questions were answered a few minutes later when the road widened into a sizable driveway in front of a two-story house. It was too dark out now to figure out what was behind the house—if it was farm land or just a regular backyard. I squinted into the darkness but the place looked quiet, there were no lights on in the window and nothing to suggest human habitation. Kairi parked the truck in front of the porch entrance and we sat in idle for a few seconds before she shut the truck off. I could tell turning the engine off seemed kind of scary to her, it mean a loss of five seconds in turning the truck back on if she needed to run away from something. I didn't blame her.

"Should we take a look around?" Axel asked, he was lounging half-in his chair half-out, cradling a shotgun. There were grey circles under his eyes and I wondered if he'd had those before.

"Yeah, Kairi you stay here with the car and the lady. Keep a window open so you can hear us." I said.

She nodded and the lady in the back of the truck made a low moan in her throat and restlessly her eyes moved under her closed eyelids; she was in a lot of pain, even with the Percocet. I opened the truck door and hopped out. I looked back at the inside of my truck, it was covered in blood from that injured woman and there were weapons strewn about. It looked like the inside of it had been through a war zone and there were dents in the bumpers where zombies had been run over. I took a handgun and my sword from the front seat. Axel jumped out with one rifle in his hand and the hanging on his shoulder. We closed the doors and Axel walked to the front of the truck, I walked around back to open the trunk so I could pull out the police-issued flashlight I'd stowed away. Without the truck's headlights it was very very dark out. It was like everything was covered in black ink. I turned the flashlight on and walked around the front of the truck and onto the porch. I took the lead this time. Axel and I got along very well in these types of situations. The steps to the porch each creaked, a sound that shattered the silence. I swept my flashlight over the porch, but there was nothing out of the ordinary to see. There were two wicker porch chairs and nothing else. Satisfied, I went and opened the front door—it was locked, with a few slams of my shoulder, the flimsy lock gave in. I stepped in and checked around like I'd seen on a few cop shows. Still nothing. I stepped into the entryway and Axel came in behind me. We searched the entire house like that, attic and basement as well, and found nothing out of the ordinary. There were no random blood splatters, no body parts littering the floor. I put my gun down, my arms tired of holding it in front of me and Axel sighed, plopping into a kitchen chair.

"What do you think happened?" Axel asked.

"I don't think anything happened, I think whoever lived here left." I gestured along the wall where there were a few pictures of an elderly looking couple and some grandkids. "If they're zombies or human, they're not here."

"I doubt they'll be coming back anytime soon." Axel said and I had to agree. An elderly couple wouldn't have much of a chance on the run, I hoped they'd found somewhere safe to settle down and were just attempting to ride out this storm. "Let's go get Kairi and our visitor."

We went out to the truck to tell Kairi the good news, we were staying here—at least for the night. Somehow, we managed to get the woman out of the back seat with only minor jostling, we settled her down on a big plush couch and covered her with a heavy blanket, there she fell into a deep sleep. The three of us went through the cabinets in the kitchen and Axel threw together a quick dinner. We ate till we were stuffed. At the dinner table that night, I could almost believe that we were just three friends hanging out, that we were not three kids on the run from flesh-eating creatures. That we hadn't killed things that were no longer human. That there wasn't a handgun resting on the table and a samurai sword in the chair next to me. After dinner, Kairi decided she wanted to explore so Axel went with her and I checked all the entranceways again before I settled in front of an ancient TV set and tried to get a news channel. Most of the channels were static, a movie network came in but with a lot of static and there were only two news networks still broadcasting.

On the first channel, an African-American women was standing in front of the white house, surround by what looked like an army. She was talking about how the US army was mobilizing and that they were planning on using Washington D.C. as a focal point and that they were going to radiate outwards from that point. It was a smart plan, securing the capital and our leader first and than moving out in an attempt to help as many citizens as they could. They were claiming that once they got the majority of DC cleaned up, they were going to fly in more soldiers to major cities like New York and Atlanta and try cleaning them up next. Apparently there was a third group of soldier-citizens attempting to do the same thing out west with Los Angeles as their focal point. They were encouraging any citizen with military experience to attempt to start up something similar in their own hometowns. Experts claimed that millions were already turned and that we were going to take more of a beating before there was any noticeable change. There was also the problem that Mexico was already overrun and that most Mexican citizens were members of the living dead. Things just went from catastrophic to shit show. I shook my head but inside I was privately glad that were weren't the only country effected by this—it made me feel less alone in the world.

I flipped the channel to the next news network and it was a man in a button-up white shirt with his tie undone. He was talking with another man about how almost all of Europe was over run. The major cities tended to breed zombies faster due to the higher population and the lack of room. He was saying that the safest thing to do was to go to the country and settle away from other people. Where there are people, there are zombies. I snorted, this was kind of a no-brainer. The other man started talking, he was a grizzled older gentleman that looked like he'd been in a war.

"It's times like these," He said. "Times like these, that test your mettle, that want to see what you're made of. They separate the men from the cowards and the humans from the zombie fodder. Now is the time for mankind to step up. We've all become weak and these zombies are preying on us like we're maggots." I stared at him, entranced. There was something about him that made me want to stop and listen and take heed to his words. He didn't say anything else for the entire time he was on the show and he was eventually replaced with a young looking guy. It didn't matter—the grizzled, old war hero's words had been heard.

The young guy started talking about the origin of these zombies but he didn't have any answers, only questions and theories. I didn't want to hear about theories, I wanted facts. I switched the channel back and it showed scenes of soldiers methodically going through the streets of DC and destroying zombies. Each unit had a guy equipped with a flame thrower who torched each zombie as they fell to the ground. They didn't want to leave any trace of them left behind in case they managed to somehow infect more people. I watched them roast bodies for a few minutes before I decided to look for a computer and see what I could find on the internet. After a few minutes of searching, I found what looked like an office that had a fairly new computer sitting on the desk. I turned it on and after everything loaded, I started looking around. I didn't really know where to start so I went to Facebook first. There were would be people on there who probably weren't still alive. It turned out to be a good idea; there were postings from some of my friends about this guy SinJin who apparently was posting tips on how to survive and how to kill zombies. He also had a running tally of how many zombie's he'd killed and he was past 100. He was performing minor experiments, apparently animals weren't able to turn into zombies, only humans. Zombieism was transferable through saliva only, not zombie blood and if the saliva got into an open wound, you were as good as dead. The transformation from human to zombie could take as little as five minutes to five hours depending on the person's immune system. And there was more, so much more. I checked out his personal information page and realized his account had only been created a few days ago. There was no personal information about him but people were talking and posting on his page about how they thought he was located somewhere outside of Cleveland. It gave me an idea—actually a couple of ideas.

I knew how to figure out where we were and I knew how we could get to where we were going, St. Cloud Minnesota with a stop-off right outside of Cleveland. I jumped up and ran back into the kitchen, going through the kitchen counter and the cabinets until I found what I was looking for. Axel came in at one point to tell me that Kairi was taking a shower and he was going to stand watch outside the door for her. I nodded and he asked me what I was doing.

"I'm getting us directions."

"Alright, I'll leave you to it. After Kairi showers, I think we should try to wake that lady up. We need to figure out who she is and we need to clean all the blood and dirt off of her..." He trailed off and I nodded, continuing hell bent on my search. I found it in the fifth drawer I searched, a pile of bills. I grabbed the envelope on top and went back into the office. I typed in the address I found on the bill and discovered we were just outside Bennington, on the border of Vermont and New York. We had over a day left of driving, we'd really wandered in circles without directions but somehow we'd managed to get two state over. I planned out a route that took us past Cleveland and wrote the directions down. I printed out a few maps I found online that we could use and I cursed myself for not bringing a GPS. I went back into the kitchen with my findings, feeling like I'd just cured cancer. Kairi and Axel had set up a shower schedule with pretty much just stating that when someone was showering, there'd be someone keeping watch and someone downstairs with our 'injured guest'. After we'd all showered, I showed them what I'd discovered and they were excited to have directions, apparently Kairi hated being lost.

"We're going pretty close to Cleveland," Kairi pointed out. "I thought we'd agreed to avoid all major roads and cities."

"I know, but I did some research and there's this guy outside Cleveland who I really want to talk to. He's doing all these experiments on zombies and I'd like to see it." Axel nodded but Kairi stared at me a little longer, as if realizing that wasn't my real reason. And she'd be right. I didn't want to just see the experiments SinJin was doing, I wanted to help him. After seeing that old guy on TV, it felt like he was calling me out. I looked around me at my ragtag group, each one I'd rescued. It was interesting to realize that. I'd started out alone, but I'd quickly gained Kairi, through her we got Axel and than my curiosity caused me to find the nameless lady on the couch. I'd had a taste of heroics and I wanted more. I _liked_ rescuing people and the friendship I gained by rescuing people was something I enjoyed. I wanted to rescue more people and I thought SinJin was just the guy to help me. I didn't want to put my friends in any more danger, but a complete stranger, I had no qualms about that.

I needed to turn Kairi's attention off of me. "I think we should wake her up," I gestured to the girl on the couch, she'd probably only been asleep an hour or two but god only knew the last time she'd eaten and I knew Axel wanted to keep her stitches as clean as possible.

Axel nodded and went over to. He gently shook her shoulder and called to her softly, she woke up with a slight scream at seeing Axel but once she saw me, she calmed down. Her eyes were still gigantic and her lower lip quivered, she was like an abused animal, she tried to sit up but winced and fell back down. "Don't sit up!" Axel said. "We had to put stitches in that cut on your stomach and you're still pretty banged up. Your ankle's probably sprained or broken but we put it into a splint. You're safe now, OK? Don't be afraid, we're not going to hurt you. I'm Axel, that's Kairi and the guy with the nice body is Riku. He's the one who found you."

"T—th—ank you." She rasped out, her voice hoarse, most likely from lack of water. Kairi got up and got her a cup of water which she helped the woman drink by tilting her head up. "Much better, thank you." Her eyes were filled with tears and she whimpered. "You saved my life, I owe you-"

"No, you don't owe us anything." I cut in. "After what that man did to you, we couldn't leave you there..." I said more softly.

She smiled at us. "My name is Namine Westwood."

"Well, Namine, are you hungry?" Kairi asked.

"Starving actually."

Kairi hurried away to make Namine something to eat and Axel and I still looked expectantly at Namine.

"You're probably wondering what I was doing in that little hick town, huh?" She laughed and winced.

"If you'd tell us..." Axel said.

"I grew up in that little hellhole and once I graduate high school, I got the hell out of there. I went to college in Boston and after a few years I left without a degree to marry a surgeon. He was a lot older than me but I was grateful to him for rescuing me from poverty. We were married for a year before one of his patients bit him—within a few hours he'd killed the maid and I'd killed him." She lifted her hand and a huge diamond glinted on her ring finger. Her mouth twisted into a macabre example of a smile that hurt to look at. Her eyes were wounded, big and blue, but they were like the eyes of an abused puppy—heartbreakingly sad. A few fat tears leaked out of her eyes and we let her cry, my mother always said sometimes you need to cry. Holding in the tears would just hurt you more the longer you kept them locked up.

"Almost immediately, it was like the entire neighborhood erupted. There were zombies everywhere. I grabbed my keys, my purse and drove back home, hoping that such a little obscure town wouldn't be hit. But I was wrong, almost the entire town was deserted, I noticed a few people hiding in their houses but I figured they were just afraid of all the stories on the news. When I got to my mom's knitting store, I realized something was wrong. The place looked abandoned but the doors weren't even locked. I was about to go in when that man grabbed me and...and...well, I'm sure you can figure out what happened from there..."

I didn't bother filling her in on how I found her and how Axel came and saved us, I didn't think she needed to hear how truly fucked up her captor was. Kairi came back at this time and helped Namine eat while Axel checked out the stitches on her stomach, they were still intact with only a little bleeding that Axel cleaned up. Namine kept saying how grateful she was we'd come along but eventually the pain came back and we gave her some more Percocets and she was out almost instantly. Axel than decided to use the computer to look for information on keeping stitches clean. Kairi placed a bag of ice on Namine's hurt ankle before going to look through the house for anything that might be useful to us. I picked up the house phone and tried to call my parents but they were still out of range and I didn't know my aunt's home number. It was ridiculous that in this day and age, I couldn't contact my parents. I sighed and rubbed my face.

I stared out the kitchen window for a while, looking into the darkness that surrounded the house. I wondered what was out there. Had zombies penetrated this far? I eventually found a light switch that turned on the outside lights and helped to cut into the darkness when I saw a barn. It was conceivable that none of us had noticed the giant barn before in this darkness. I looked at the barn and realized one of the heavy doors was slightly ajar. I didn't really like that. I picked up my glock and the flashlight before I walked out the back door. I swept the flashlight over the ground in front of me and kept my sense alert. I came to the door of the barn and stuck my flashlight in; I didn't see anything move. I walked in a flipped a switch I found on the wall that turned on a flimsy overhead light. There were a couple of horse stalls that looked like they'd been empty for a long time. After looking over the barn, I determined there was no one in there and I left, closing the barn door and locking it with a plank of wood. I didn't want it opening again. I walked back to the house and let myself in the kitchen door. I shook the feeling of unease off my mind and settled myself in front of the TV so I could watch the news again.

There was a Japanese woman on the screen talking this time about how she'd examined a sample of zombie blood and noticed a strange bacterium floating in the plasma. It was an interesting new development and I listened to her talk for a few minutes before I thought I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye. I looked over and saw nothing, but recently, I'd learned to never let anything go so easily. I got up and looked closer at the place where I'd thought I'd seen something, a paper that had been on the table was knocked off. I stepped into the kitchen and something hit me in the back of my leg. I jumped about twenty feet in the air and whirled around and saw a little white cat leaning against me. It rubbed its face on my calves before sauntering further into the kitchen, its white tail held high above its head. I let out a rush of air that I had been holding in and I felt my body deflate. I sagged onto a kitchen chair and cradled my head in my hands. The cat turned around and meowed at me, it sat down and stared at me expectantly.

"What?" I asked. "What do you want from me, cat?"

It meowed and licked one of its paws. I stood up and walked towards where the cat was sitting; it jumped up and started weaving between my legs, meowing. It didn't take me too long to figure out that the poor thing was probably starving and that it seemed to be begging for food. The cat starting meowing insistently at me as I opened one of the cabinets the cat seemed to gravitate towards and found it a can of food. I picked up a paper plate and opened the can of food with a knife. I sat in down on the floor and the cat began to devour the food with a zest that told me the thing probably hadn't eaten in days. I slide down the cabinets until my butt touched the floor. I crouched there next to the cat, finding solace in petting its back. There was a black collar on its neck with a name tag that read, 'Honey'.

"Honey, huh?" The cat ignored me and continued eating, I couldn't blame the thing. Axel and Kairi showed up a few minutes later, finding me and the cat in companionable silence. Kairi immediately swooped down on the thing, petting it and squealing over its cuteness. I smirked at that, it was a such a stereotypical girl thing to freak out of a cute animal.

"Who's your friend, Riku?" Axel asked as he set down a bag of candy in front of me.

"This is Honey."

Axel almost choked on the candy he was eating. "Y—you-you named the cat Honey?" He asked as tears streamed out of his eyes.

I snorted, "Read its collar, dumbass." He laughed at that.

"Riku, I've been thinking," Kairi began. "What if this guy is some kind of psychopath? What if he's like that crazy guy who used Namine as bait? There are worse things out there than dying, you know." She twisted the hem of shirt up in her hands and I could tell she didn't really like talking against my idea. Over night, I'd become the unofficial leader of this little rag-tag group.

Axel and Kairi looked at me expectantly. "Well, I guess it's just that gut feeling or something. I feel like this guy is at the forefront of the battle against these zombies and I kinda want to help." I replied lamely.

"But what about your parents?" Kairi asked.

I shook my head, "I don't know Kairi. I've been trying to contact them but I get nothing, they're out of range. According to the news, they should be fine—they're out in the middle of nowhere..."

"Still, I don't think we should go close to the city. I agree with Kairi and the original plan. Let's avoid everyone else. It's a dick-ish thing to say but it's the only way we'll survive. Eighty percent of the country has to be fucking zomb-ified. They'll just try and kill us. I mean we'll could be throwing other people to the wolves but I care more about living." Axel's interjection came with a period of silence as we all mulled over his words.

"You're right." I said. It would be the three of us against a fucking army of the undead. Even if SinJin was on our side, how could we expect to come out alive?

"I do like living but... how could we leave people out there when they could need help? Look at Namine, Riku, you saved her life. Riku you saved _my_ life. I guess—I—I guess I want to repay the favor. I want to find SinJin and try to help save some people." Kairi said, she dropped the hem of her shirt and looked Axel and myself in the eye as if daring us to tell her she couldn't do it.

Axel laughed, "So to Cleveland! I guess. This may be the worst fucking decision of my life but it sounds like it might be fun. You know 'kicking ass and taking names'? It's a favorite past time of mine."

"Woah, Axel. I thought you all for saving yourself?" I quipped.

Kairi placed her hands on her hips. "No, he was for your idea the whole time—he just knows how to guilt-trip me." She said with a fake glare.

Axel and I took fast showers and we went to bed soon after that, all of us sleeping in the living room, Namine on the couch still, and Axel and Kairi on the floor. I took the first watch and paced restlessly around the house for a while before sitting and watching the news. It was just repeats of the old shows that had been on. In fact, one of the stations seemed to be stuck in a continuous loop of just one interview, like someone was pressing replay and not letting go. It was the asian lady talking about the bacterium in the blood plasma. I got so sick of hearing about it that I turned the television off. Honey sat on my lap for a long time before she got up and disappeared into the house, presumably to find a more comfortable bed. It was a little after two when I heard her insistent meows.

They were the same meows from when she was begging me to feed her and I figured the thing was hungry again so I got up and went into the kitchen. I didn't see her there but I thought I caught a flash of white going around the corner. Maybe she was leading me to her snacks this time. "Alright, already. I'm coming cat." I sighed. I rounded the corner and something lunged for my throat, knocking me backwards into the wall. My head knocked painfully against the wall and I saw stars. It took me half a second to pull myself together and realize that there was a fucking zombie on top of me. "Shit!" I kicked my legs and bucked my hips, throwing the thing off me but it landed only a foot away. I tried to scuttle away on my ass but the zombie was on top of me again. It opened its mouth and hissed at me, sending hot, stinking breath all over my face. The smell made gag. It latched its hands around my legs and pinned them together so I couldn't buck it off again. I started pushing at it and hitting it but it wasn't moving. Blood was running down my face as the cut on my head kept bleeding. Almost out of options, I reached for the zombie's face and shoved my thumbs into its eyes. One eyeball burst under the extreme pressure while the other one popped out of its socket.

I took the zombie by the shoulders as it blindly tried to bite me and threw it off me in a move I think I saw on WWE. It hit the cabinets and I heard Axel call out something to me but he sounded far away and everything in my head was kind of fuzzy. I crawled towards the kitchen table where some of the weapons had been left and the zombie started walking around trying to find me. It was hissing and seemed really angry as it banging into walls in its search to find me. I grabbed a gun off the table and leveled it at the zombie with my shaking hand. My first shot hit it in the shoulder and the zombie started running towards me since the gunfire gave away my position. It took a deep breath and tried to steady my trembling arm and clear my muddled head. The zombie was inches away from running me down when my bullet caught it between the eyes—or what used to be its eyes.

The zombie fell on top of me and I didn't have the energy to unpin myself. Luckily, Axel was there a second later and he dragged the zombie off of me. Kairi was in front of me trying to grab my attention but my eyes were riveted to the corner, underneath the table. It was a pile of white fur and blood that was already drying. The cat was dead.

A half an hour later, Kairi had me cleaned up and most of the blood was washed out of my hair. Other than banging my head really hard and giving myself a headache, I was no worse for the wear. In Axel's infinite wisdom he's concluded that the chances of me having a concussion were quite small. But I felt like I'd been hit by a fucking train.

I couldn't stop thinking about the dead cat. I wasn't really an animal person and I'd barely know the damn thing but I couldn't stop thinking about how it had died. It had been ripped to pieces—most likely by that zombie. Kairi and Axel had left me in the living room with the still sleeping Namine to examine the house to figure out how the zombie got in and if there were anymore. The dead zombie was still lying on the kitchen floor.

Kairi and Axel came back ten minutes later, they'd checked the whole house and found no other zombie and only one entrance point. It had smashed open a window in the cellar and gotten into the house through the basement door. I couldn't understand how I hadn't heard anything. The breaking glass, the cat being ripped to shreds, how had I missed that?

"I didn't hear any of that..." I sighed.

Axel was more concerned with other things. "Riku, man—why didn't you call for help? We were right fucking there! You could have been bitten. Jesus, you should have yelled for us."

I shrugged my shoulder, "Sorry Axel, I guess I was just so surprised, I forgot to yell."

Axel looked unconvinced but Kairi looked confused.

"Riku?" She asked, "How did you find the zombie if you didn't hear it breaking in?"

She looked at me and I looked at the kitchen and thought of the dead cat. A look of horror dawned on my face. "We have to get out of here." I said and I got up and starting running around, packing things up frantically.

Axel and Kairi stared at me like I was nuts and my mind was racing a million miles a minute. "Riku, what's going on?" Kairi said as I started grabbing all the weapons and piling them in the middle of the living room floor.

The loud noise startled Namine awake and she looked around frantically until she realized it was just us. "What's going on?" She asked.

"It was a trap. A fucking trap. The zombie set a trap for me. It was making the same noises the cat was when I was feeding it and it used part of its fur or something to lure me to it. It set a trap for me and it worked."

"A—A-A trap?" Axel yipped. "What the fuck is that supposed to me? It set a trap for you? These mindless fucks? You said the first one you saw ran right through a fucking glass door to get you? I've seen other foiled by a fucking box in the middle of the road. I mean for god sake's that fucking hillbilly proved how gullible they were? He lured an entire towns-worth of zombies into an alley using the same goddamned trick. And you expect me to believe that over night—no! Within the spaces a few hours, these fucks have learned how to set traps advanced enough to lure a person in?" Axel kicked over a chair and yelled in frustration. He started throwing things off the counters and yelling and cursing.

Kairi just collapsed to her knees and held her head in her hands. "What does this mean?" She asked.

"We'll it means that either they're learning or some of them are smarter than we thought." I said grimly.

"No, I meant, what does this mean for us? Aren't we supposed to be the dominant species? Isn't the only thing that sets us apart from animals is our minds? And now these things... we're all doomed. Mankind is being fucked and none of us are going to make it. There's a new social order and we are nothing but food." Kairi said and fat tears leaked down her cheeks. Namine made some kind of strangled gasping motion and Kairi quickly wiped her eyes and went over to Namine.

Axel was gathering the rest of our stuff in the middle of the floor while mumbling to himself. I, on the other hand, knew exactly what we had to do. I went into the office and turned the computer on. The room was suddenly filled with the soft droning of the machine. I found SinJin's page and sent him a private message telling him what happened. I sat around for a few minutes and looked to see if other people were experiencing similar things. There weren't any other new posts and with dread in my heart, I wondered how many people had been taken in by these creature's ploys. How many of the people who had posted earlier were gone now?

I was about to sign off when a message popped up on my screen. It was a response from SinJin, it said:

Riku,

I believe you. This isn't the first story I've seen where they've displayed some level of intelligence. But your case is by far the most advanced. The zombie must have been studying you and realized that if it imitated the cat, you would come looking for it. The most astonishing part to me is that this zombie clearly had some level of self-restraint. It didn't try to attack you the first time it saw you but instead watched you, trying to gain an advantage. Riku, I believe we could learn a lot from each other. Come find me.

Sora

End Chapter 2

Author's note – I did get a much better reception for this story than I thought a would. Apparently, zombie apocalypse themed stories aren't as a rare as I thought they were. To all those who wondered where I got a lot of my ideas, well I tried to my hardest not to borrow any ideas about zombies in this story. I'm sticking to the extreme basics, they eat brains, they're zombies and they can infect other people by biting them. Just for a kick, I threw in the idea that maybe some of them are getting smarter. Anyway, reviews are appreciated! They are my life blood and make me feel good every time I read them.

PS- To all of you who wanted to see Sora, sorry but soon! Instead, I gave you Namine!


	3. Chapter 3

The Resolute

Chapter 3

Author's warning! - This a particularly brutal chapter. I won't give anything away but those of you with weak constitutions are warned.

We were all in the truck no more than five minutes after I read that e-mail. I left it up on the screen, hoping that if some poor soul came upon my zombie encounter they'd learn something from it. I put the truck in reverse and executed a quick u-turn, driving away from the house. I flipped the high beams on and squinted into the darkness to make sure I didn't drive off the barely-there road.

There was quiet amongst us for maybe a whole three minutes before Kairi spoke up. "Maybe we should head towards Washington... you know, the army is there along with scientists. We could tell them what we discovered." She supplied hopefully.

"Kairi, the chances of us even getting there are so minimal-we'd have to drive down the East Coast and I honestly can't think of a more populated and urbanized part of America. Even if we did drive around all the cities and took rural back roads, it'd take more than a day and we'd probably be too late by then. We can be more help if we go find this SinJin," Axel replied. I could tell he'd already been down this line of thought and had dismissed it. None of us really wanted to go along with my plan because it meant believing that the zombies were actually becoming more intelligent, or worse—they were retaining more of their human intelligence. Actually, I'm not sure I know which one is worse but to me, it all boils down to a lower survival rate for me and my friends and I do not like that at all.

"I guess we're kind of stuck then—there's nothing we can do but find SinJin," Kairi said, sounding defeated. I understood, I wanted to hand this problem off to adults so that I could go take a nap or something. But since the world's been going to shit these past few days, that's out of the question.

Namine whimpered from the backseat and I knew that she wasn't too far from have a Kairi-esque breakdown. But she held it in, took a deep steadying breath and stared out the window into the darkness surrounding us. She was putting a brave face on and so would I—I owed that to my friends after dragging them into this mess with the trap-setting zombie. I sighed and thought about what my father would do in this situation. To be honest, he'd be in complete control: taking stock of his inventory, calming down his troops, and mapping out a route towards his target using the safest and most efficient path. Staring at my hands in the ten and two position on the wheel, I realized I was never going to be quite as good at this as my professionally-trained father. I was going to have to make due with hand-me down lessons from my ex-marine father and my stock of Die Hard movies. I almost laughed to myself at the thought of me being the next action hero.

Instead of going out and saving the known world, I drove across state lines and in a few hours was in New York heading closer towards SinJin. We had about a 14 hour trip ahead of us as Kairi had planned it via an atlas she'd found in the basement of the abandoned house. She poured over a map of New England with a small penlight and rubbed her eyes every so often. My fear kept me awake and alert. Axel was snoring behind me and I had no clue whether Namine was awake or not. On the dark side roads a sign whipped past us saying that Queensbury was 50 miles south of us.

Kairi shook her head as we drove past the sign; we'd seen some other drivers on the road but none of them had stopped to talk to us. She shifted in her seat and fussed with her clean t-shirt. The best part about stopping at that house was the shower and the washing machine.

"What's that?" Kairi asked, pointing at a spot a two hundred feet away from us.

I squinted with my tired eyes, "Hmm... looks like a stopped car." I slowed down as we got closer to the car, curious to see if anyone living was in it. As I was about to drive past a man jumped in front of the car, waving his arms. On some weird instinct, I slammed the brakes instead of speeding up to hit what could be a potential zombie attacker. I stopped a foot short of hitting the guy and he let his arms fall on top of the hood of the truck.

"Oh thank God." I heard him say.

"Shit..." Kairi mumbled and Namine made a noise of agreement. The guy came around to my side of the truck and I hesitantly rolled down my window.

"Thank god!" He repeated again. "We've been stuck out here for two hours. Our engine blew and we don't have the parts to fix it. No one's been by in forever! Please you have to help us! My wife you see, well, she's pregnant!"

I stared at this black haired man with a calculating gaze, examining him for anything suspicious. It made me feel like a dick to even think about denying this guy help but if he had a hidden agenda, he could fuck over me and my friends.

"Alright, I'll see if I can do anything," I said and Kairi made a noise that sounded like she didn't quite think this was the smartest idea. But heroes frequently make stupid mistakes, right?

I pulled over to the side of the road and did a quick glance over before I got out. I reassuringly touched the glock at the small of my back and gave a knowing look to Kairi. She nodded back and pulled out her own gun, keeping it hidden. Axel snored in the background.

My sneakers crunched on the gravel beneath my feet as I walked over to the other car. It was an old station wagon with its hood up and the man was peering at the engine. I wearily walked up and he thanked me, he was just so grateful to even see another human. He started pointing out to me what he thought the problem was.

"I used to work on engines back in high school at my local garage. Nothing too fancy you know? But I think the fan belt may have broke or something and I have no idea how to fix that..." He said, scratching his head. I leaned in closer to take a look and smelled something odd. On a whim I looked under the car but couldn't see anything.

"Hey, you got a flashlight?" I asked. He nodded and handing me a dinky little dollar store flashlight that barely made a dent in the darkness under the car but it showed me what I needed to see. "You're leaking oil," I said, motioning towards the dark stains under the car.

The man sighed, "Crap—we can't fix that without a mechanic."

I remembered what he'd said earlier about his wife being pregnant and how they'd been stuck out here for hours. Who knew when the next person would drive on past. "We can give you a lift if you want, we're headed towards Cleveland."

He looked at me funny, "I don't know why you'd want to go somewhere populated—where those damn zombies are crawling all over the place! But we'll take you up on your offer. We have no where else to go." He clapped me on the shoulder and went to tell his wife while I went to tell Kairi what just happened. I had a strange feeling that something was off; whatever I'd smelled earlier, hadn't smelled like oil. I walked back to the truck and spoke to Kairi in a low voice. She didn't require much convincing that we needed to help this couple once she heard the wife was pregnant. One of the side doors on the truck opened and I saw the man carrying a few provisions that looked like they mainly belonged to his wife. Over his shoulder I could see the heart-shaped face of his wife, smiling in at us.

"Here, sweetheart," He said as he helped her climb in the truck. She was heavily pregnant and looked like she might go into labor any minute now, a thought that had me worried.

"Oh here! Please sit back here with me! It has the most leg room!" Namine called out, gingerly moving herself over. She gave a small noise of pain but her smile only faltered for a second.

"Thank you!" The other woman said and she sat down next to Namine with her husband's steadying arm. Somewhere during all the commotion, Axel had woken up and he moved a box back towards the wife and motioned for her to put her feet up. "Oh thank you so much everyone! You're like angels!" She exclaimed which made Kairi laugh. The husband finally settled into his chair once he was sure his wife was comfortable and closed the truck's door.

I drove off, happy to leave that strange smell behind. A few minutes later and we were back up to speed, I rolled the window down slightly just to give myself some fresh air to keep myself awake. In the rear-view mirror I caught a glimpse of Axel going back to sleep.

"So how far along are you?" Kairi asked.

"Almost nine months!" She replied excitedly. "This is our first child and I'm so excited to be a mother!"

Kairi giggled and introduced all of us to the newcomers. In turn, the woman introduced herself and her husband to us. "I'm Aerith and this is Zack! We were on our way to my mother-in-law's house when we heard about the zombies but we figured we'd be safer out in the country anyway. My mother-in-law lives out by herself and her two dogs in the middle of the mountains practically!" She giggled to herself. "Now my husband says that you guys are headed out to Cleveland. What's your f-f-final destination?" She asked curiously, working through a sudden stutter.

"Well, I have relatives outside of Cleveland!" Kairi lied. I shot her a quick glance, she gave me a reassuring look back. "They live on a farm and it's really no where near Cleveland but it's just easier to tell people it's near there. Do you want us to drop you off at your mother-in-law's house or something?"

"Well, that would be great but I don't think it's anywhere on the way to Cleveland. It's in a really remote part of the mountains—my mother's kind of a recluse." Zack butted in with a laugh. "We just need to find a car with gas and then we can head our own way. I'm sorry to be such a pain in the ass."

"We just have to get to his mother-in-law's you see! She used to be a...a..." Aerith trailed off for a second and Zack shot her a confused glance. "...a mid-wife! And I'm pretty far along and going to a hospital doesn't seem very safe these days." She giggled like her momentary pause hadn't happened. I looked at Kairi but it seemed like she hadn't noticed anything strange about Aerith's pause. She continued to chat on with the couple and I drove further on into the night as dawn approached.

A half an hour later, I was stifling a yawn. Kairi was still talking to Zack and every so often Areith would respond too but her interjections were growing more and more sparse and her pauses more frequent. She seemed to be growing tired which wasn't that strange for a pregnant woman. I was just counting it a blessing that we hadn't had to stop for her to go to the bathroom yet.

For the first time in a while Namine pipped up. "Ohh..." She groaned.

"What's the matter, Namine?" Kairi exclaimed, turning around in her seat.

Namine choked back a whimper as she touched her stomach under her blanket. I rolled up my window and almost instantly started to smell something weird...maybe something coppery. "I must have pulled a stitch when I was moving earlier..." She pulled her hand out from under her blanket and revealed a blood covered hand. Instantly there was screaming and I slammed on the brakes. I put the truck in park but Kairi was already out of her seat, she'd climbed over the arm rest between our chairs and into the back part of the truck where all the screaming was coming from.

"Oh my god!" Kairi yelled and I took that as a bad sign.

"Aerith! Aerith, honey!" Zack was screaming and pulling on something and I jumped out of the truck; I threw open one of the back doors and Axel came tumbling out while Kairi was frantically hitting something with the butt of her hand gun. She wouldn't dare fire under these tight conditions. Suddenly, I realized what was happening.

Aerith was bent over Namine, her mouth to the blond haired woman's stomach. She was _eating_ Namine. I had to swallow hard to avoid vomiting. Namine's screams were mixed in with the sickening sound of ripping skin, the screams of Zack, and the dull thud of a head getting smashed in. Zack was pulling on his wife but it wasn't doing him any good, in fact he was in the way of Kairi. I growled and gave the back of his jacket a hard yank and he came tumbling backwards on top of me. With an oomph we hit Axel who was still on the floor. There was a gun shot and the screaming stopped to be replaced by the sound of heavy breathing and whimpering.

I pushed a screaming Zack off of me and jumped up to join Kairi in the truck. She was holding back choking sobs and Aerith had slumped over onto Namine who was making jerking motions and coughing up blood. I grabbed Aerith's body and pulled her off of Namine and set her body down on the ground outside of the truck. There was an entrance wound between her eyes that was slowly bleeding. Zack threw himself on top of her sobbing and Axel jumped into the truck to help Kairi with Namine.

"Why? Why?" Zack screamed. "Oh, my baby..." He was crying loudly and it was making me nervous. He looked up at me, "She was pregnant... she was having a baby!"

I looked at him but my heart was hardened as I looked at him cradling his dead-zombified wife.

"Did you know?" I asked quietly.

Somehow he heard me over his own screaming and looked at me with tears drenching his face. "No..." He whispered, "no... I just thought it was the pregnancy. I mean she seemed off... Oh God. I left her at the gas station alone three hours ago... She'd told me she'd locked one in a bathroom stall and run out before it could get her... but I guess she lied. Oh my God, Aerith." He whispered, hugging his wife to his chest.

Kairi and Axel gingerly carried Namine out of the truck and laid her down on the ground. She was clutching her stomach and choking still. Kairi brushed a lock of golden hair out of Namine's face and a tear dripped down Kairi's cheek. I looked at Axel and I saw what was written on his face-Namine wasn't going to make it. She hadn't been on the steadiest ground before and now she looked like she was knocking on death's door. I shook my head and cursed.

"How long do you think we have?" I asked no one in particular.

"It took minutes for my father to turn and he was an elderly man in OK health... I'd say minutes, seconds even." Kairi gave her honest opinion and I had to agree with her, already it looked like Namine was turning a sickly shade of zombie-gray.

"Shit," I muttered and Namine looked over at me.

"P..plea..se..se" She whimpered at me. I knew what she was asking but there was no way I could do it. I could barely kill a zombie, let alone my own friend. I'd barely known the woman but since rescuing her, she'd become important to me. But looking up at my friends, I knew I had to be the one to do it. Axel had been the one to stitch her back up and give her a chance at life. Kairi had helped nurse her in the short time we'd been with her. She'd given the woman a sponge bath and spoon-fed her. I'd saved her and I'd end her.

"Guys, you should probably look away." I warned and Kairi started openly weeping. She grabbed Namine's hand and turned her head away. She was there for her friend but couldn't watch her demise. Axel got up and walked a little ways down the road so that the blast wouldn't be so deafening. I pulled the glock out from my waistband and leveled it between Namine's eyes. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry." I said and God help me, she gave me a weak smile. I closed my eyes for a second and when I opened them, I pulled the trigger. Namine died right there that night with a smile on her face and the back of her skull missing. A little part of me died there as well. I dropped the gun to the floor and walked a little ways down the road, leaving Kairi to grieve Namine's untimely passing.

I caught up to Axel and he clapped me on the shoulder just as gun fired again. I whirled around, running back towards the truck. I stopped short and sucked in air. It seemed a third person would die tonight. We left Zack and his wife's body lying there. We didn't have any shovels to bury them so we just settled for pulling them a little further away from the road. Namine was left there as well. Kairi had managed to pick a few wildflowers in the feeble dawn light and put them in Namine's hands that were delicately placed across her chest. It hurt my heart to look upon the dead couple and my dead friend.

It wasn't right.

We eventually piled back in the truck and kept driving. I sat behind the wheel again; I wouldn't be sleeping anytime soon. Killing was leaving me with waking nightmares. And once again it was the three of us: Axel chain smoking, me driving, and Kairi sobbing. It made me want to laugh when I realized we'd come full circle. But it wasn't a good kind of laugh; it was the hysterical and deranged kind and I could feel it bubbling up in my throat. There was no stopping it. The laughter started slowly but it got louder, causing Kairi to stop crying. I could feel her and Axel staring at me but I couldn't stop laughing. I slammed on the brakes and put the truck in park before jumping out into the darkness to vomit into the dirt.

Kairi followed after me with Axel lingering by the driver's door. "Are you OK?" Kairi asked over the sound of my retching. There was a look of acute horror on her face and she didn't even bother to hide it. I didn't blame her but that didn't stop me from yelling.

"Am I OK? Kairi, Kairi... I am so fucking fine right now. There isn't even a word in my vocabulary to describe how fucking great I'm doing right now! The end of the world has been amazing so far; thank God I didn't miss it!" I yelled at her and picked up a tree branch that had fallen from a nearby tree and hurled it off into the darkness. There was just so much anger and self-loathing that had been brewing under my calm exterior and it was all rising to the surface. I couldn't control it and I think they realized that because they let me yell and scream for about a half an hour before I became too exhausted to continue my destruction of the nearby flora.

I collapsed against a tree trunk and eventually Kairi came over and with some gentle nudging, convinced me to get back into the truck, this time in the passenger seat. Axel must have attempted to do a cleaning job because there was no gore in the back of the truck and the coppery smell of blood was gone as well. I curled up in the passenger seat and Axel got behind the wheel and started the engine. Before pulling out from my impromptu parking spot he handed me two little pills.

"Here, I think you'll need these." I had no idea what they were but I took them dry and within a few minutes I was dead asleep, drifting off to the sound of Kairi and Axel's soft voices.

I woke up hours later to the noise of rain pounding the truck. Rain came down in buckets with enough force to cover the windshield in a slick almost translucent layer. Axel was hunched over the wheel, trying to peer past the blinding raindrops at the road ahead. We were on some dirt road, going between what looked like newly planted corn fields. I straightened up from the strange slouching position I had fallen asleep in and grimaced when I felt a kink in my neck.

"Wh—where are we?" I asked; my mouth felt like sand paper and my tongue seemed to be glued to the roof of my mouth. I had just slept, but I still felt exhausted.

Axel sighed. "Hey, sleeping beauty, you're awake. And we're probably in the middle of upstate New York. You've been out for a while, and we passed a sign for Syracuse about an hour ago. But don't worry, we're staying far away cities and people. In fact, we've only seen a few cars and they've all been heading north—claiming it's zombie-free or something. But let me tell you, public radio is saying that all of North America is pretty much overrun and that the only safe places are in the most remote parts of the continent." I nodded my head at what he was saying and glanced back at Kairi who was staring at the corn fields going by.

"Look, I'm sorry for last night... I shouldn't have done that," I said, my face red.

Axel looked at me sharply. "You have nothing to be sorry for. You've been nothing but in charge the entire time I've known you—I figured something was bound to crack you sooner or later. I'm just sorry that it was _that_. You're a stronger person than me, that's for sure." Kairi didn't say a word.

"I don't know about that," I replied. We lapsed into silence for a while and I tried to unsuccessfully call my parents and aunt again, but I had no signal and my phone's battery was about to die. "Do either of your cell phones still have battery?" I asked.

"Nada," Axel replied, pointing towards his expensive smart phone. "That thing has been dead even before you guys got me. Has about two days worth of charge, the piece of crap."

"I lost mine..." Kairi said. I had a feeling it had probably been left behind in that abandoned house.

"Isn't it funny how we have so much technology at the tips of our fingers and now when we need it most, it's gone? I mean, last time we checked there were like two friggin' TV stations still working, the internet was useable—unless you wanted wifi or something, and all our cell phones are practically useless. Scratch that," he said as my phone loudly powered down, the battery completely drained, "they are useless." He gave a humorless chuckle at that.

"Well, my parents were always telling me to play less Xbox, I guess they got their wish," I replied. Something about the hopelessness of our situation was turning me into a comedian.

"So what are we going to do when we get to Cleveland. Do we even know where this SinJin is? How are we going to find him?" Kairi suddenly asked, turning her attention away from all the corn stalks.

That stopped me, I didn't exactly know where SinJin was. All I knew was that he was around Cleveland. I'd never even been to Cleveland. "Well, when I messaged him, he told me to 'come find him' and he'd signed the message 'from Sora', instead of SinJin." I responded.

"Sora... well, that's a strange name. Heh, I never figured your hero was a chick, Riku," Axel said with a chuckle.

"I guess it is a girly-sounding name," I said with a sigh, "But that still doesn't help us."

"We could try searching the name Sora in association with Cleveland into Google or something." Kairi suggested.

"We don't have an internet connection." Axel replied.

"Well, I guess we are going to have to make a stop at the next town and try to find a working computer or something."

"Even just an outlet to charge my phone—we'd be able to use it to surf and stuff like that." Axel supplied.

"But what if that gets us nowhere?" I asked.

"Then you send your little girlfriend a message demanding she tells us her whereabouts. I didn't drive across two state lines to be stopped because you're too shy to ask a chick her address." Axel deadpanned causing Kairi to giggle.

I snorted in response and wished everything were as simple and easy as Axel made it sound. I wished all of our lives were that simple. It would be awesome if we could go back to the way things were before that zombie came crashing into my glass door but that was impossible. Wishing and wanting doesn't get you anywhere anyway...only action does. I looked out the passenger window and couldn't even find the energy to sigh in frustration that I was eighteen years old and wasn't at home hanging with my lacrosse buddies or at some lame high school party. I wasn't even getting ready to play a game—psyching myself up for the adrenalin rush, I was sitting in a truck, driving to Cleveland so that I could hopefully team up with some chick I don't know and try to save the world from strangely intelligent zombies.

Fields of baby corn stalks rushed past the window and we passed a flock of crows hovering over something that was probably dead or dying. There was nothing I could do and I couldn't help but feel useless since whatever was out there in that field was beyond my help. After losing Namine and that couple, it felt like a sucker punch in the gut—like the universe couldn't stop bringing me down, you know? I'd rescued Kairi but hadn't come soon enough to save her adoptive parents; I'd saved Namine only to let her die in the most hellish way—eaten by a zombie and shot by her savior and friend. I briefly wondered if my name was written on God's shit list or something.

But you can't feel sorry for yourself all the time, which is why I turned on the CD player in the truck and we jammed for a little to my father's taste in classic rock. For a while, it seemed like we were just three normal kids driving to someplace where we'd meet up with other normal kids and do normal kid things. I chuckled out-loud but was drowned out by a ripping guitar solo.

Eventually we ran out of music and starting talking about ourselves and our childhood. Kairi, it turned out, went to that expensive private school on scholarship because she was some kind of piano prodigy and had been thinking of taking up the flute or the violin or something before all the shit hit the fan. She'd been put up for adoption after her biological parents—who were recent immigrants to America from Korea—died in a car crash one winter night. Kairi had never know her birth parents but the way she spoke proved that her adoptive parents had been good to her and she didn't regret being their daughter. Axel's childhood was another story; his father had been an abusive drunk and his mother had finally got fed up and left her husband one night, dragging Axel out of the house behind her. They'd been pretty nomadic for the first eight or nine years of his life but that was before his mother meet some wealthy real estate agent and they settled down in the rich part of town. He'd been out as gay since he was in middle school and had gotten his ass kicked for it quite a few times—at least until he grew to 6'5''. He and Kairi had become friends in orchestra, where he played the violin and guitar. He'd gotten his job as a radio jockey from a friend and tried to avoid his mother and step-father as much as humanly possible. He didn't really seem to care what happened to them.

I told them about my childhood as well. I'd grown up in a loving and ethnic household. My mother never let me forget my Japanese heritage. My father never let me forget that the Marines ran in my blood and that you never grew out of being a Marine. You were a Marine for life. I told them about cross-country, track, and lacrosse. They laughed when I told them how I'd been kicked out of band for being such a terrible clarinet player. Compared to the two of them, I'd had an eccentric but picture-perfect lifestyle; my mother was a successful doctor and my father had retired from the Marines and worked part-time. We lived in a big house and were never wanted for anything. I had a feeling in my gut that my parents were the reason I was still alive. All the lessons they had taught me in my life had been detrimental to my survival these past few days.

Kairi broke me out of my morbid thoughts with a story about how once, Axel had accidentally set one of the Chemistry teacher's hair on fire and they'd gotten out of school for the rest of the day. We laughed about that and I told a funny story of a friend who got detention by rolling down a hill during a fire drill. Then Axel told me how Kairi had been Homecoming Queen this year and she instantly started crying.

"We're never going to have that back," she sobbed. "My parents are gone, most of my friends are gone, and I've never even been on a date. I've never been to prom or been kissed by a boy! This just isn't fair. Riku—you and me—we never even got to graduate! Even if this all blows over and gets fixed soon, we're never going to be able to get that back... some things just can't be fixed."

"Ah, Christ, Kai—I know. I know, babe. What's happening right now fucking sucks. It majorly blows. I guess this is what happens when God acts like a dick." Axel said, glancing up worriedly in the rearview mirror at his friend.

I shook my head. "You know what? I don't think God has anything to do with this," I replied, looking up through the windshield at the cloudy sky above. "I just can't believe that anyone could be this damn cruel."

Kairi sniffled again and choked on her own snot as she try to gasp for air. Her eyes were red and tears streamed down her cheeks. She didn't look attractive at all but I realized I didn't even give a damn. The girl could look how ever she wanted—she'd been through hell and back after all.

A few minutes later, the sky opened up and rain poured down, pelting the windshield. I watched a streak of lightening light up the sky, followed by a crash of thunder that I could feel in my bones. The thunder was loud enough to make Axel jerk his hands on the steering wheel and the truck swerved slightly as he righted the wheel. The rain sounded like a machine gun as it hit the metal of the truck and the road quickly flooded before our eyes. Luckily, the truck could easily make it through the lakes that were rapidly forming on the road.

Eventually, it began raining so hard that Axel couldn't see the road in front of him. He rolled down the window and stuck his head out, immediately becoming soaked. "There's a house up there!" He called out and I tried peering through the rain to see it.

"Oh no! Remember the last time we stop at a supposedly abandoned house?" Kairi said. She had her arms crossed over her chest and had a stubborn look on her face to go with the dried tear marks.

"I have to agree with Kairi, besides, this house is too close to the road. Anyone or anything could see us." I replied. Axel grunted in response and brought his head back into the car and rolled the window up. "Dude, you are fucking soaked."

Axel looked down at himself and realized the top half of his shirt was completely soaked and his hair was dripping water everywhere. "Well, would you look at that?" He replied sardonically. We drove for a little longer through the pounding rain until the corn fields turned into old farm houses closely nestled next to one another. We'd stumbled into the small town of Old Hope. Its population had probably been around three hundred before the zombies showed up. Now it looked like a ghost town complete with tumble weeds. There were no mysteries as to where the towns folk had gone, a lot of their remains still littered the roads and there were limbs everywhere. "Old Hope, a pleasant town of about 1.5 people, numerous body parts and hundreds of zombies."

"Oh Axel, that's just morbid." Kairi pipped up.

"And it's probably true," He said with a shrug.

"Let's just find a library or coffee shop—somewhere with internet connection." I butted in before Kairi could respond and this could morph into some kind of a fight.

"I think there's one up ahead; it looks like a cheap version of Starbucks or something..." Axel pulled into the parking lot and we grabbed some weapons and the laptop before dashing to the front door. The rain slammed down on us as we ran and I got to the door first. It was locked but I took the butt of my sword and rammed it twice into the glass causing it to shatter. I reached in and unlocked the door, gaining a shallow cut in the process. By this time, Kairi and Axel had caught up and I pushed the door open and went in. I was wary but the fact that the door had been locked and it was pouring had me convinced that nothing had heard us or even seen us enter. It was dark inside but no one made any move to turn the lights on.

Before we did anything else, we swept the little coffee shop for zombies and checked all the windows and doors. I told everyone to make sure every thing was locked—I didn't want another zombie sneaking up on us again. Granted, maybe it was a terrible idea to lock ourselves in a building with one of the doors already busted. But I was willing to take that risk.

We met back up in the front of the shop. Kairi plucked up a little flyer that was on one of the tables. "It says they have free wifi here..." She trailed off. I nodded and took out the laptop, booting it up. It opened up to my MSN homepage and I realized that the news hadn't been updated in days. "I'm going to make us something to eat. I'm tired of eating pop-tarts and cold re-fried beans." Kairi called out as she wondered back behind the counter. Axel followed her.

"I'm making coffee. I need caffeine so bad," He said.

"Just keep your guns with you." Was my only response.

It took me a few minutes to connect with the internet and I started searching for Sora's name in conjunction with Cleveland. Her name came up on the school honor roll a few times. She'd gone to Cleveland Regional High, a school on the outskirts of the city limits. Her name appeared in conjuncture with a few other articles in her school's newspaper; apparently she'd been a big part of the school's mechanic program...an interesting past time for a girl. That seemed sexist. On a whim, I searched Sora and mechanic. Nothing specific really came up so I narrowed the search by adding 'car' and 'Cleveland'. Immediately, I got a few hundred results. They all led to a website for River Valley Mechanic Shop. It was run by the same family for the past fifty plus years and on the homepage of the website was a picture of said family. There was a father, two sons, and a daughter, all of them covered in grease and wearing blue overalls. They were all brunettes with blue eyes. I figured the girl was Sora, she had her brown shoulder length hair flipped up at the ends and her eyes smiled at the camera. She probably never stopped moving; she didn't really seem like the SinJin I had learned about online but who else could it be? This family of mechanics was the only lead we had for finding SinJin.

I glanced at the male family members, an old bald guy with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, a tall brunette with a puss on his face and a couple hundred tattoos, and a short brunette with a wide smile and an unruly mass of hair. They were an award winning shop that had been in the top ten in their area for the past twenty years. In his off-time, the father and current owner, Cid, made supped up motorcycles for rich clientele. His eldest son was poised to take over the shop when he retired. I jotted down the shop's address and went and tried to check Facebook but the website was down. I browsed news websites but most had nothing recent posted. It made me worried.

After a while, I wandered back to the mechanics' website and I clicked a few links but couldn't learn anymore information about Sora other than she worked at her father's shop part time. I scrutinized the image on the home page. I couldn't drag my eyes away from the two sons in the image. The eldest had stormy gray eyes and a cold calculating look on his face. Something about his expression set my teeth on edge and I could almost feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The other son was younger and his eyes were as blue as the summer sky. He seemed like the happier, light hearted version of his older brother.

"Did you get an address?" Axel butted into my thoughts, placing a cup of coffee by my hand.

"Thanks and yeah, I think I did find an address for a Sora in Cleveland."

"Well, a name like Sora is not that common—it has to be the one we're looking for. Did you try Facebook messaging her?"

"The website is down... a lot of websites are down. And the major news sites haven't really been updated," I said, once again trying to get on to Facebook.

"It's the only lead we got, so I say, lead the way Captain," Axel said, giving me a mock bow and sliding into the chair next to me. He put a cup down for Kairi and tipped his chair back before taking a sip of coffee. "God, I love caffeine. Wasn't sure how you liked your coffee so I didn't do anything to it," He said before taking another sip of coffee.

I took a sip of burning hot coffee and revealed in the sensation of the strong taste. "I love black coffee."

He chuckled, "You are one strange dude, Riku. I had always pegged you for a sweet tooth."

I was about to make a comment on the amount of sugar Axel was dumping in his coffee but Kairi came and placed a huge plate of scrambled eggs and pancakes down in front of us. "Some of the pancakes are chocolate chip!" She exclaimed and she placed three plates and some forks and knives down next to the food. Axel jumped up and retrieved some maple syrup that his sweet tooth probably led him directly to.

We quickly started stuffing our faces; I couldn't even remember the last thing I ate. There was very little conversation on my part and I lifted forkful after forkful to my mouth. I glanced over at Axel at one point and grimaced when I saw him empty half the bottle of syrup over two pancakes. After we were done eating, I cleaned the plates; it felt wrong to leave them out and dirty even though I doubted the owner of this coffee shoppe was ever coming back.

"You know, this is stealing," Kairi said to Axel as he shoved coffee cake into his mouth that looked a few days old.

"Hell Kai, it's the end of days. I'm going to hell for worse things than stealing food and breaking and entering that is for sure." Axel joked; something about what he just said triggered an image in my head. Namine looking up at me—her eyes begging to be put out of her misery. Begging to be saved. I shivered; it felt like someone had just walked over my grave. I shook my head and scrubbed harder at the remnants of egg still on the plate I was cleaning. Before we left, we raided the kitchen for any food we could bring with us. Axel even managed to find a travel thermos for coffee.

We piled back in the truck, Axel driving and me in the back. For once, we had managed to stop without anything bad happening to us. It was a nice change of pace and one I hoped would be the norm from now on. As we pulled out of the town, I tried to get some rest; my stomach was full and I was feeling pretty good. As I was about to nod off, I caught a glimpse of a body on a front porch. It was just lying there and looked like it had been there for a few days. There were flies and maggots and even few crows feasting off of it. All of a sudden, I didn't feel quite like sleeping.

We were five hours away from Cleveland when I finally managed to fall asleep. I woke up three hours later when Kairi took over the driving. The sun had set a while ago and the road was lit up by nothing but the truck's high beams. I stayed awake for the last leg of the trip and helped her navigate through the suburbs of Cleveland with the route I had memorized off of Mapquest when I been on the laptop earlier. We took a few winding turns through residential areas and had to kill more than a few zombies along the way. I gritted my teeth as I rolled down my window and point blank shot a zombie between the eyes. It immediately dropped off the truck's door and was run over by the rear tires.

"What is that now, seven for you and six for me?" Axel asked from the back and I grunted in affirmation. Kairi rolled her eyes at us.

I'd never been to Cleveland before and I wasn't quite sure what I expected from it. But once we reached the city's outer limits, it became cow country and my mind was baffled. We'd gone from a handful of skyscrapers to what looked liked the middle of nowhere. All I could do was shrug a shoulder and hope to God we were on the right track. I directed Kairi to turn off one road and onto another and she made the tight turn effortlessly. Five minutes later, we were there. It was an average-sized garage that looked closed for business. There were a few cars parked outside but the place looked like no one was home. The shades were drawn and the sign on the door even said closed. But it was the place we were looking for.

"Well, we're here," I said. Kairi pulled into the parking lot but didn't put the truck in park.

"Not the hero's welcome I was expecting but I guess it'll do." Axel said with a mock sigh, "Let's get this over with."

I jumped out of the truck and grabbed my sword and handgun. Axel had a shotgun. "Pull the truck around just in case, Kairi." She nodded and as we walked towards the shop, she drove away to turn the truck around. Meanwhile, Axel and I walked towards the entrance to the office. He walked slightly in front of me and reached the door first. A tentative touch revealed that it wasn't locked. He pushed the door open, causing a bell to ring. I froze at the sound and I heard Axel gasp. We stood stock still for a minute and heard nothing. Axel looked back at me and I gave him an encouraging nod to keep going, we'd already announced our presence to anyone or anything nearby. He held his shotgun at chest level and checked around the office, behind filing cabinets and under desks. Nothing. Nothing moved, nothing made a sound, except the idling engine in the parking lot.

There were two doors in the office we hadn't explored, one led out the back and was locked; Axel tried the other and it opened, revealing darkness. Axel took two steps into the doorway when I heard the sound of a gun being cocked. Axel only stopped moving when cold gunmetal was pressed up against his temple.

"You walk as loud as a herd of elephants." A clear, female voice rang out.

"Sora?" I asked on a whim.

"What? No, I'm Selphie!" Her indignant voice rang out and in her momentary confusion, she moved the gun from Axel's head and I took advantage of that. I grabbed her and slammed her down into the ground as the gun went sliding across the floor. Axel's attacker was a lot shorter than I had expected and she let out a small shriek as she hit the ground. Since when had I started tackling little girls?

"Hey, you jerk! What's the big idea?" She whined as another voice called out.

"Selphie? Selphie are you OK?" A guy older than Axel came running up with a huge shotgun in his hands that was leveled at me. I looked up at him and he lowered his shotgun. He was the older brother I'd seen on the website in the family photo. He was tall, taller even than Axel. He wore a leather jacket and a white t-shirt with a pair of dark jeans and cowboy boots. The lethal looking shotgun in his hands made my toes scrunch.

"Are you Riku?" He asked. I nodded and got up off of Selphie and offered her a hand up; she tipped her nose at me and punched me in the shin before getting up by herself.

"That's no way to treat a lady!" Selphie quipped.

"Ah, but Selphie you are no lady," The older guy said.

He looked at me and offered me his hand, "I'm Squall, but you probably know me better as SinJin."

I shook his hand. "But you signed your last message to me as 'Sora'..."

He turned to Axel and shook his hand as well. "Axel," my friend grunted with a nod, still keeping a weary eye on Selphie who was sulking.

Finally, he turned back to me. "My brother, Sora, sent you that last message for me. He didn't want to use the name SinJin so he just put his own name. I told him it would just make things more confusing for you, but you made it here anyway so I guess it doesn't matter," Squall said as he started walking further into the darkness. I was surprised to learn that Sora was apparently a boy's name.

"Hold on," Axel said before he could move too far. "Kairi is waiting for us out in the car. We can't leave her out there."

"Actually, she's pretty safe. Sora set up some trip wire and other booby traps around the place so that we'll know when someone's coming," Squall said. We'd probably triggered an alarm, like the bell, without even realizing it which was why Selphie had been there waiting, not because Axel walked like an elephant herd.

Axel started to point this out to Selphie, which got them quickly involved in an argument. I took that as my cue to sneak out and get Kairi. I walked back into the office and out the front door, giving Kairi a little wave to get her to come over. She shut the truck's engine off and hopped down out of the driver's seat. I could see her quickly tuck a handgun into her pant's waistband. She walked over to me gingerly and I could see she was apprehensive about what we'd discovered in the building.

"Well, we found SinJin," I said and she nodded but didn't look anymore relaxed.

We walked back into the building and as the door closed behind her, Kairi took one last longing look at the outside. When we walked back, we could hear Axel and Selphie arguing a little way ahead of us so we just followed the sounds of their arguing through the darkness. At one point Kairi tripped on a wrench and I had to quickly right her. Further ahead, there were brigh artificial lights in the ceiling glaring down, illuminating the darkness. I could see Axel waving his hands around in a frustrated manner as he tried to make a point to Selphie who just wasn't hearing it. Squall was sitting at desk in front of a brand new laptop and was tapping away. There was an old Ford Mustang in the middle of the garage and a pair of legs sticking out from underneath it. The garage was huge with three giant metal garage doors that were padlocked closed. There were spare car parts littering the floor and a large assortment of tools hanging on the walls. The garage looked well worn, old but still in shape.

"Squall, this is Kairi," I said, doing quick introductions. He nodded gravely at her and called me over.

"I invited you here to learn more about the zombie that tricked you," Squall said, immediately getting down to business. "A few stories were rolling in about strange zombie activity but yours was and still is—by far—the most advanced case I've heard about." He was still typing away on his laptop as he spoke and I got the feeling he was taking down detailed notes. So I told him about my encounter with the zombie and made sure not to leave out any detail. Squall grilled me anyway; he wanted to know some of the most minute details. He seemed a little bit annoyed that I couldn't give him the exact answers he wanted but I think he understood that in a life or death situation, I wasn't trying to figure out how long the zombie looked like it had been dead for.

He shared a few stories with me that sent chills down my spine; stories about unfortunate people who'd encountered zombies that were starting to obtain a higher level thought. One girl told him how she and her boyfriend had been chased down by a group of zombies working together like a pack. She had described behavior eerily similar to that of a wolf pack attacking.

Then Squall got down to the nitty-gritty. "I need to gather more information about zombies if we're going to be expected to fight them. Estimates to the current zombie population are in the hundreds of thousands—maybe even millions. The point is that no one knows. We've been effectively cut off from outside communication since there's no TV, no cell phone service, and barely any internet. Today's society isn't equipped to deal with a catastrophe of this size and strength. We're waiting for someone to come in and save us but there is no one. There are zombies on every continent but Antarctica and every country in the world is currently overrun. The zombie virus has spread like wildfire and we need to do something." Squall delivered a fiery impassioned speech that caused him to get a little wild eyed.

Suddenly hands slapped down on mine and Squall's shoulders. "You're going to scare our guests away!" The interrupter said. "I haven't even introduced myself yet. I'm Sora." He held out a greasy hand for me to shake and gave me a blinding smile. I could barely manage to mumble out a hello, I was so tongue-tied. His picture on the website hadn't done his eyes justice. They were such a bright brilliant blue that I couldn't pull my eyes away. Sora's eyes seemed to bore down straight inside of me and I had a feeling he could see every emotion that was raging to escape my carefully pieced together facade. I knew if he looked hard enough, he could see the insanity that was licking the edges of my brain like a barely controlled fire. He was the one who broke our eye contact by turning towards Kairi. He started talking to her and I felt like I could suddenly breathe again. It was a startling sensation.

Sora broke away from Kairi to go over to his older brother and pat him gently on the back. "You should go to bed Squall, you've been up for the past forty-eight hours. Don't worry; Selphie and I can take care of things here. Now go on, you look like a zombie yourself." Squall gave small laugh at this and nodded his head. He bid us goodnight and when I took a good look at the guy, I realized he did look as exhausted as his brother said he was. Squall left, but not before kissing his sister on the forehead.

Axel came over to us and took the seat that Squall had vacated; a petulant looking Selphie trotted along after him and sat on the edge of the desk. Sora gestured for us to pull up some chairs and I went and grabbed three folding chairs.

"So where are y'all from?" Sora asked, he seemed like a genuinely genial person and Kairi warmed up to him pretty quickly. She started chatting with him about his family's shop and eventually he asked about our drive here. Kairi fell silent and neither Axel nor myself had the heart to talk about Namine and open up those tender wounds.

"It could have been worse," Axel settled for saying and I nodded in agreement.

Selphie pipped up, she'd been silent for the last few minutes. "That's good! It was terrible the first day or two around here but once Sora set up some alarms around the shop, it's been much easier to defend ourselves."

"You set up the alarms?" I asked, looking at happy-go-lucky Sora and remembering Squall's earlier words.

He rubbed his head and tried to deny it but Selphie butted in. "Oh he's being modest. Our Daddy says he's got the finest mechanical mind he's ever seen! Sora could build anything he wanted to." The girl said it so matter of fact that I believed her. It certainly went along with those newspaper articles I had dug up about him.

Sora jumped up. "Well are you guys thirsty? I'll bring out some drinks." His cheeks were flushed pink under his dark tan and I could tell the guy was embarrassed.

Selphie giggled as he ran off and said, "He's just being modest. My older brothers are both geniuses in their own rights." She said proudly with her head held high.

"Ahh, modest, smart, and cute. Does your brother have any flaws?" Axel sighed with a dreamy look on his face. I rolled my eyes at Axel and Kairi looked like she'd seen this act before. "Ugh, he's about as mature as a five year-old and can be really thick sometimes." The girl said, crossing her legs. She nodded her head twice, causing her hair to bob along with her movements. I hadn't noticed before but she was wearing a bright yellow jumper with the shop's logo detailed over her right breast. Her feet were covered in scuffed cowboy boots.

Kairi leaned back with a sigh, stretching her arms behind her head. "It's so nice to just have light-hearted conversation without immanent death hanging over our heads," she observed and I had to agree with her. Since Namine and that newly wed's untimely demise, the three of us had sat and stewed in guilt—me especially. I gave her a tight smile that didn't quite reach my eyes.

Selphie was really interested in hearing about the zombies we faced; she had a morbid sort of curiosity about all of it. Axel was telling her how we had raided a gun and ammo store back home when Sora returned. He tossed a can of iced tea at Selphie and gave the rest of us cans of soda.

"Sorry, we don't really have that much variety to choose from at the moment." Sora joked.

"It's alright," Kairi replied with a smile. "Tell us about the alarm systems you made."

"I'm sure it would just bore you..."

"Oh just tell them already!" Selphie interrupted, punching him on the shoulder.

"Alright," Sora put his hands up indicating a truce. "I didn't really do anything too crazy. I put up trip wire in the back, behind the shop that rings a bunch of bells." He pointed to the corner of the shop where several bells were hanging. "There's another set for the front of the building too. I set up a few security cameras around the parking lot perimeter which is how Selphie saw you coming. Around the doorways I set up these little laser sensors that we had left over from a motorcycle project. I just tweaked them a bit, so that they'd register movement and send up an alarm when someone walked past them or opened a door. I wanted to set up trip wire but knowing Selphie over here, she'd trip on it. Then, I pretty much put the garage under lockdown and reinforced all the doors and windows. I'm still tweaking it a bit but we have a pretty good system in place."

"Pretty good?" Axel echoed. "You've created a fortress!"

"But fortresses aren't always practical," I said.

Sora nodded, "Very true. We've already had problems with supplies. Squall had to drive into town with Selphie and raid our local grocery store or we would have run out of food. I stayed behind and while they were gone, a half a dozen zombies showed up. I managed to kill them with a hammer and a hand saw but we had no real weapons. We were in a fortress but we had no way to defend ourselves. Luckily, Selphie managed to break into my dad's safe and find the two guns he kept in there. And we've been here ever since." He finished up.

"But your brother...I was reading about his experiments." I prompted.

"Oh, well...Squall is in his second year of med school and did a lot of research when he was in college. He's really interested in how this 'virus' spreads and what it does to a person. I don't really know much about it but he's really obsessed with it. He was using Facebook as a way to gather information quickly and was kinda pissed when the website went down. But Squall was really excited when he read your message. I was kinda freaked out but he kept saying it was, 'an unforeseen and interesting turn of events'. Acted like it was the greatest thing ever. Anyway, I think he just wanted to pick your brain or something."

Suddenly, the bells in the corner of the garage rang and Sora shot up. "Well, I'd better go take care of that."

"No," I said standing up. "I'll go, I'm a good shot." He nodded and sat back down. He might have been telling his brother to get some sleep but Sora seemed to be ignoring his own body's needs. "The bells means they're in the front of the building, right?"

"Yessir," Sora replied.

I nodded and heading out, my handgun drawn and my sword in the other hand. I had been feeling antsy sitting around talking. And after that miserable ordeal with Namine this morning, I was ready to fuck something up. I peered through the blinds in the office and understood what Sora meant when he said he'd reinforced them—there were iron bars welded to the window frame. But beyond the bars there was one sole street light. In the meager light I could see what looked like two or three zombies shuffling around. They probably didn't even know there were any people nearby. I opened the door, remembering to hold the bell steady so it didn't make and noise and took a step outside. One of the zombies stopped shuffling and sniffed the air. He turned and locked eyes with me and started running towards me, screeching with limbs flailing. His attack alerted his buddies and the other two zombies switched into attack mode too.

I waited until the lead zombie was twenty feet away before shooting him in the head. My aim had been getting steadier as my body got used to shooting. He dropped and started crawling towards me, half his brain blown out the back of his head. Another shot ended him altogether. The other two zombies were fast approaching. One of the zombies was slightly ahead of the other and I angled myself so that the zombies were almost lined up in a row. The first zombie ran himself through on my sword in his frenzied attempt to reach me; I used his body as a shield against the other zombie whom I shot three times before he dropped. I kicked the zombie off of my sword and with a swift hack, I severed his head from his body. I wasn't taking any chances. I systematically beheaded the other two zombies before heading back in the shop. The door closed behind me with the tinkling of a bell and I removed the clip from my handgun. There was one bullet still left but I didn't think one bullet would save me from an army—better to reload now. There was a full clip in my front pocket—the last one I had on my person—and I shoved it in into the gun.

When I got back to the garage, only Axel was still there.

"Well that was quick," Axel said and I grunted in affirmation. "Kairi and Selphie went to bed. Sora went to go watch you on the security monitors." He pointed off to a door that was half hidden behind car parts.

I flopped down in a chair next to Axel and tucked my gun back into my pants. I lifted my sword up and made a face when I realized it was covered in blood. That was most certainly going to rust. I shrugged my shoulder and wiped the blood off on my pant leg.

"Dude, that's just gross." Axel gripped.

"Hey, I can't have this thing rusting on me. My mother would be so pissed," I said, giving him a smirk.

He rolled his eyes at me, "So what do you think?" He waved a hand around to indicate everything around us. I glanced around and saw four car doors and several motorcycles lying around. There was the Mustang that Sora's legs had been sticking out from under and various other types of cars parts. I guessed that Sora was still working on the cars even though their owners were most likely long gone. The expensive laptop sat on the desk, humming away and Squall's notes were scattered around the desk.

"Well, I think they've got damn good security," I said. "Sora obviously knows what he's doing. This place is protected like a fortress."

"I meant about Squall."

I nodded, I knew that was what he had meant from the beginning. "I'm not sure. What he's doing could be insanely useful."

"Are you that thick? I meant looks-wise!"

"What the hell?"

"Jesus Riku. You can fight an army of the Damned but you can't notice when someone is interested in you."

"I have no idea what you are talking about."

"It makes sense now—why he'd invite you here. He obviously wants some ass. He couldn't drag his eyes off of you! Man it was so freakin' obvious."

"Axel, you're nuts."

Our conversation was interrupted by Sora coming back and settling into an empty chair. "That was pretty good, although, I was a little worried when I heard the laser alarms go off. I didn't expect you to leave the office and go out there and fight 'em off face to face. I guess I should have realized you were into close-range fighting when you walked in here with that sword." Sora replied.

"Sorry, I didn't want to shoot the glass out on your windows."

"Eh, that's what the iron bars are for," he said with a grin. He had on dirty, oil-stained jeans and a t-shirt from his high school with a cartoon Viking kicking a soccer ball. On the back was a sarcastic quote about victory, a typical high school sports team shirt. Sora didn't really dress to impress and I had a feeling it had nothing to do with the impending zombie apocalypse. He didn't strike me as the kind of guy who gave two shits about the clothes he was wearing, as obvious when looking at his ratty sneakers. The guy was also pretty filthy, covered in grease and oil and God knows what else. He reached down and grabbed my sword allowing his shirt sleeve to ride up to reveal a tattoo. I tried to figure out what it was but all I could see was a crown and some gears.

"Now where in the world did you get this from?" He asked.

"It's my mother's and it has been in my family for generations. It was just an ancient family heirloom until she got it cleaned and sharpened so she could put it on display. And it has saved my ass a few times now. Doesn't seem right to leave it behind."

He nodded, "Have a wrench around here somewhere that saved my life when the first zombies started attacking. One of 'em wandered into the garage while I was tuning up this old Mustang. Only reason I didn't get caught unaware was because the zombie knocked over a pile of sheet metal. Made one hell of a racket. I didn't realize there was something wrong with him until he tried to take a bite out of me and them I socked him in the head with the wrench and he stopped moving. I was terrified! Thought I'd accidentally killed a customer, so I ran and got Squall who had been watching the news and heard about some of the first zombie attacks. So far as he can see it, the zombie attacks started in America at pretty much the same time across the damn nation. It's totally got him and his buddies baffled."

"Buddies?" Axel asked.

"Yeah, he goes to med school at Yale and made a bunch of genius friends who are working on this whole damned mess. They're holed up somewhere in some lab in upstate New York. My brother would join them but he can't leave me and Selphie behind."

"Why doesn't he just take you two with him?" I asked.

"Can't leave this garage behind either. It's all we have to remember our old man with. He died a few months ago from lung cancer. Smoked a pack of cigs a day for the last thirty years. Can't say I didn't see it coming."

We were all quiet for a few minutes after that. I didn't really know how to respond.

"At least the zombies didn't get him." I finally said and Sora nodded his head in agreement. After what happened to Namine, Zack, and Aerith, I could officially say that I've probably witnessed some of the worst ways to die. What could be worse than being eaten to death or having your heart broken to a million pieces? I'm not sure but I know that hearing about someone dying from something as natural as lung cancer was a refreshing change in this new world. A new world. That really was what we had entered and I hadn't even noticed it. There hadn't been any announcements or newspaper articles welcoming me to the new world. I guess that goes to show you that the future is never anything like you expect it to be so embrace the stability of today because the world could go to hell tomorrow.

End Chapter 3

Author's note – If anyone hasn't noticed by now, I'm totally making up what Cleveland looks like and the area surrounding it. Please roll with it. I'm also giving Sora slightly southern/western twang. I've pretty much never been anywhere outside of New York and the tri-state area so just let me use my imagination. And this chapter was particularly brutal and gory but I realized that in the apocalyptic world, no character can be safe. I accept your hate mail with open arms.

And if I can interest anyone in proof reading for me, well that'd just be awesome.


	4. Chapter 4

The Resolute

Chapter 4

Author's Note – As always, be ready for that good old ultraviolence.

Sora sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. "Shoot, I just can't believe you guys made it here. I thought you coming here was like a suicide mission—I didn't expect you to even make it."

Axel snorted in response. "For a while, I didn't expect us to make it either. But somehow we got lucky and Kairi's neighbor turned out to be the son of Rambo." He joked, pointing his thumb at me.

I looked up from my sword; I'd been picking at the hilt for the last couple of minutes, swept up in thoughts of my father. My mother and father...they were still out there somewhere. I pulled out my cellphone and looked at the black screen. "You don't happen to have a charger that will fit this thing do you?" I asked, holding my phone up for Sora to see. He took it from me and looked at it.

"Sure—I think Selphie has a similar phone. Let me go check." Sora took my phone with him as he walked back into the shop where it looked like an office was located.

Axel sighed and ran his hands through his hair. "Man—I feel like we did it. We made it here—we're at home base, you know? We're safe, but I don't feel like we are."

"Yeah, I know what you mean. I can't help but feel uneasy about this whole thing. Sora and Squall seem like them have everything under control but if there's one thing I've learned—it's that just when you relax you get fucked." I said.

Axel snorted at me. "No need to be so melodramatic, but I totally fucking agree. They're acting like they're totally safe because they set some traps and shit, yet we just came here and told them how a zombie set a trap for us. It's like some fucked up version of Mousetrap or something. It's so weird how they totally accept your story and think it's amazing but they're not doing anything about it."

"I feel like they probably should have pumped up their security a little bit. Tripwire, two cameras, and some bells? Maybe if this was Home Alone 3 or something"

"There has to be something they're not telling us." Axel stated point blank.

"I couldn't agree more."

We were then silent until Sora rejoined us. "It fit, so your phone is charging right now."

"Cool, thanks." I replied. Once it was done charging, I could try calling my parents again.

"So Son-of-Rambo and the Red-Haired Wonder, care to make a trip with me in the morning?" Sora asked, picking at some of the grease caked under his fingernails.

"What for?" Axel asked immediately.

"Need to pick up supplies at our local hospital for Squall to continue some of his experiments. The only reason he agreed to sleep is because he ran out of petri dishes and shit," Sora replied nonchalantly. "It's a twenty-five minute drive away from the city so it's a little more secluded but it has been crawling with Z's the last few times I went. Luckily, I found a back entrance into the lab that lets me get in and out quick."

"Huh, sounds dangerous," Axel replied. "I'm in."

It seemed like Axel was a little out of touch with his own humanity lately and I didn't blame him. I'd never felt so vulnerable and yet so invincible with this sword in my hand. Its metal gleamed in the bright lights of the shop and I realized that it was still wicked sharp even though I'd been treating it like shit. I need to take better care of it if I didn't want my mother to kill me.

There I go again—thinking about my parents. What if they weren't as safe as I thought they were? What if the unthinkable had happened and they had succumbed to this new plague? I shook my head. I couldn't think like that. My father had survived hell in war and my mother dealt with shit everyday—if anyone could survive the apocalypse it was the two of them. They were a veritable dream team.

"What about you, Riku? You in?" Axel asked me.

"Who else is going to watch your ass?" I replied. The second Axel had said he was going, I knew that my fate was sealed too. We were partners now for better or for worse.

"I knew you'd been looking at my ass." Axel teased.

Sora laughed, "Why don't you two get some rest. You probably haven't had a decent sleep in forever. It's my turn to stay up and watch so don't worry."

We tried to protest that we'd stay up and help Sora keep watch but he wouldn't hear any of it. Instead he just directed us to the loft where his dad had built a little hang out to keep him and his siblings occupied while he worked.

"Once you get to the end of the hallway, go up the stairs. Don't go down into the basement—we haven't totally secured it yet. The door is dead-bolted though so you can't get in it anyway. There are some couches and other stuff upstairs. Make yourselves comfortable." He said and he gave us a short salute before grabbing a hunting rifle and heading away from us.

I glanced over at Axel and raised an eyebrow but he looked too tired to register anything. Together we walked up the stairs but I couldn't help but stare down behind me at the basement door. There was a huge deadbolt lock on it but somehow, I didn't think that would be enough.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

There was a steady noise that sounded like water dripping from a faucet. It shook me out of my studying and I looked up from my textbook.

I thought that I should probably go close the faucet or I'd give my father a heart attack when he realized I was wasting water. You know 'I served in a desert,' he'd say. 'You had to conserve water or you'd end up as dry as the sand around you.' Another one of his war stories. I'd heard a million of them.

I closed my textbook and got up from my desk. My feet made almost no noise on the carpet as I walked out of my room and down the hall to the bathroom. I stuck my hand in the doorway and felt for the tap on the faucet. It was shut tight. There was nothing dripping from the faucet. Maybe something was dripping from the shower-head then. I flipped the bathroom light on and stalked over to the shower.

I threw open the curtain and had to bite back a scream when I saw that the tub was filled with blood. I stood frozen as my mother's face drifted up out of the murk, to the surface. There was blood splattered all over the shower and it was dripping from my mother's severed hand that was still attached to the shower faucet.

I quickly spun around and was face to face with some shambling mess that's face looked like it had lost a fight with a lawn mower. It raised one huge fist to me and I closed my eyes as it smashed me to the ground.

As the zombie advanced on me, I realized it was dragging my father's dead body behind it. I stared up into its black, black mouth as it was lowered towards me. I couldn't move. I couldn't breath. It was about to be over.

I shot straight up—sweat pouring off my body.

A nightmare.

Just a nightmare—none of it had been real. Just a terrible dream.

I shuddered and had to shake off my last feelings of unease. I was safe now. But God only knew about my parents. It had seemed so real though. I stood up and walked over to the window that was hidden behind venetian blinds. Everyone else was still asleep and I didn't want to wake up any of them. Kairi was passed out on a couch with Selphie asleep in the recliner next to her. Axel and I had just slept on the floor, with two pillows and a blanket shared between us. He was still out cold, on top of the blanket. I wouldn't be surprised if he was drooling.

I stared out the window for a while. There was nothing really behind the mechanic shop but fields and fields of tall grass. There was a barbed-wire fence out behind the shop that looked like it could slice flesh to ribbons. And there by a power box set next to one of the poles in the fence was Sora, crouched down with a tool box. He fiddled with something in the box for a little while before stepping back from the fence to toss what looked like a stick onto the top of the fence. The second it hit the wire, sparks jumped up and the stick started smoking.

Satisfied with the results, Sora packed up and walked away. I couldn't really comprehend what I had just seen. An electric fence? Why hadn't we been told about this? An electric fence isn't something you just gloss over when it comes to surviving the zombie apocalypse.

I couldn't help but wonder what other secrets, they had been keeping from us.

In the morning I went downstairs to find Selphie and Kairi setting up a cold breakfast for everyone. I helped them out a little in setting out utensils. Eventually everyone else straggled in and we settled down for a meal that seemed out of place. It was a nostalgic feeling, being able to sit down and eat a simple bowl of cereal in such a fucked up world.

I shoveled Lucky Charms into my mouth with little care for my surrounds. It wasn't until Axel jabbed me in the shoulder with a fork that I realized Sora was trying to talk to me.

"Fuck," I muttered as I rubbed the sore spot on my shoulder. I looked up and realized that everyone at the table was looking at me expectantly. "Uh, what was the question?" I asked, faintly embarrassed that I had been to easily distracted by food. Kairi giggled at me—I hadn't heard something so light-hearted from her in a while.

"I was telling you that we'd be leaving soon, so you should get anything you may need. To each, his own weapons!" Sora said, brandishing his spoon in a flourishing arc like a sword. There was a slightly manic gleam in his eyes that stirred up strange feelings in my gut. Not able to use my voice, I just nodded my head and continued shoveling food into my mouth.

"Doing your best 'dumb jock' impression, I see." Axel said in snarky tone.

That raised my head from my bowl. "I _am_ a jock—I'll get back to you about that dumb part though," I said, threatening him with my spoon.

"Oh yeah, what do you play?" Squall asked me, from over his coffee. I just grinned.

"I always saw you in your backyard playing lacrosse with your dad..." Kairi mused out-loud.

"Lacrosse in the spring time, track and cross-country the rest of the time. We'd be playing a big game today...I'd been looking forward to it." I got lost in my thoughts for a moment before smiling. "But you never can tell what the future will hold, can you?"

"Hell, never thought I be caught dead here," Axel said, motioning to everything around him. "Man, I never even knew any of you guys existed until a few days ago."

"The feeling is mutual." Selphie said, sticking her tongue out. Axel and Selphie started bickering back and forth with Kairi trying to soothe all the ruffled feathers; Sora turned towards me.

"I play soccer—I know what it's like to suddenly have normalcy ripped up from underneath you and land in the world of surreal. A week ago, I'd been in here working on cars after dark and ignoring the homework piling up on my desk. I wouldn't be planning on stealing supplies from a rundown hospital, that's for sure," Sora said.

"I guess this is where the men get separated from the boys—figuratively speaking," I added hastily glancing over at Kairi. She'd more than shown her worth on this trip. She'd probably had the worst time of it out of all of us and she was the glue that had brought us all together. Kairi had brought Axel into our two-some and her mere presence had given me something to focus on other than the hell that was surrounding us. Kairi was a light spring breeze in the Sahara Desert.

Sora chuckled and stood up from the table, taking his dishes to a dirty sink in the corner of the shop. "Leaving in ten minutes, ya'll. Better be ready." He called over his shoulder.

The next spoonful of cereal tasted like cardboard in my mouth.

Sora was sitting in old Dodge Ram pick-up truck. The red paint was rusting and the leather seats were worn and smelled faintly of cigarette smoke. I went in first and took the seat in the center and Axel slid in beside me. Keeping in mind what Sora had told us earlier about the hospital being overrun, I'd armed myself to the teeth. I had a handgun stuffed down the back of my pants, a shot gun slung around one shoulder and my sword in the other. I'd wanted to leave the sword behind but then Axel had said that it might be useful if we need to make a quiet kill and I knew Sora would agree.

Axel had a hunting rifle and a home-made ammo belt that he wore with pride. The ass had even painted black lines under his eyes with grease and tied an old camouflage bandana around his head. I knew he was only doing it to lighten the situation but he still made me roll my eyes.

"What you have your sword and Rambo-ness to make you look like a bad ass. What do I have to intimidate the zombies with? My wit?" Neither Sora nor I made any further comments on Axel's appearance.

Sora had equipped himself with what looked like a goddamned assault rifle from God knows how many years ago and a wicked hunting knife that he had shoved down his boots. The guy had told me to come armed and next to him I looked like I was going out for a stroll. A black assault rifle gleamed in the sun between us and I wondered where he had managed to lay his hands on something that looked like it came from a battlefield.

"It was my uncle's." Sora supplied without me asking. "He was the youngest of my Dad's brothers and ended up dying over seas in Iraq. They sent him back here since we were the only family he had. My Dad hung the gun up in his office in a special case as a tribute to him...I guess neither of them realized how damn handy it would be."

"My dad is an ex-Marine and cop," I said.

"Well that explains a lot." Sora laughed.

"And his mom is a surgeon—it was like he was born for this kind of shit. How is the average Joe supposed to compete with The Terminator over there?" Axel groaned, pointing his thumb at me. He had the window rolled down and was once again chain smoking. I guess he hadn't really quit after all. Some habits die hard.

It was about a twenty minute drive to the hospital along rolling roads that Sora took at breakneck speed. My stomach was protesting the four bowls of cereal I had this morning. Axel looked a little green around the edges himself. The whole time, Sora kept on chattering in his slight southern twang. I was mesmerized, listening to the lilt in his voice.

"There it is," Sora said, pointing with one hand. "James H. Walker Hospital. We're taking the scenic back entrance to the lab. Now if we can pull this off like we did last time, I'll be going in, one of you will get the car and the other can go halfway in. It'll kinda be like a chain of watching one another's back. I'm for sure going in since I know the layout and what we need. Someone needs to stay with the truck. Which one of you can drive stick?" Sora asked.

"I can." Axel volunteered which was a good thing because learning to drive stick was something I had never gotten around to doing.

"I guess I'm the halfway man then. You may want this," I said, handing Axel my dad's handgun. It'll be easier to use than that bulky thing if you're staying in the car."

He took the gun and nodded. "I'll be fine don't worry."

Sora pulled up behind the hospital where looked like there had been an attempt at evacuating. There were still cots and stretchers littering the parking lot. Hell, even a few IV drip stands were lying around in random places. It looked like a bomb had gone off. There was debris everywhere and few of the cots still had bodies in them. I assumed those individuals had most likely passed on after being detached from their life-saving machines. There were a few bodies on the ground in scrubs and lab coats and some others in street clothes. I could almost smell the bodies rotting in the sun from here.

"It seems like after the Z's attacked, they tried to evacuate the patients. Most of them got out to other hospitals—but I don't know how much good that did them. Squall volunteered here a lot over the years and was actually here when the first Z's showed up. It's a miracle he made it back to us after how long he stayed here, trying to save those people. It tore him up a bit inside, that's for sure." Sora said. "Hell, if I was him, I probably would have ditched the second the Z's started eating the patients. You'll have to ask him about it."

"Sounds like a riveting bedtime story," Axel drawled.

"Heh, well you two got the plan, right?" Sora pulled up close to a door set in the back of the building and put the truck in park. "Alright, pretty boy—let's get going," he said as he jumped from the cab of the truck.

I turned to look at Axel as he open his door. "Pretty boy?" I asked, one eyebrow quirked. He smirked at me and slid off the seat.

"Time waits for no man, pretty boy! Come one!" Sora called from the doorway of the building. I sighed and hurried after Sora into the dark building.

Sora walked a few paces ahead of me and turned around, he had a duffle bag slung over his shoulder that I hadn't seen him put in the truck. I assumed it was for carrying whatever it was that Squall needed. "You ready? I'll take the front and I'll tell you where to stand—you'll be able to see me but you won't really be able to see the doorway."

I nodded in agreement and hiked the shotgun further up on to my shoulder so that it was out of my way. "So tell me Sora, what is so important that your brother needs you to risk your head and ours?"

"He's been doing experiments—like he told you. Squall is a genius; if there is anyone who can figure out what created the Z's, it's him. Him and his think-thank of complete genius friends at Yale. They're still there—at Yale, that is—locked up in some lab trying to figure out what makes the Z's tick."

"So what does your brother and his friends think caused all of this?" I asked, genuinely interested in hearing what Squall had managed to discover.

"He could probably explain it to you better than I can. His friends think it is some kind of virus or something—but they can't figure out how it infected so many people at around the same damn time. They're attempting to find a connection but now that the internet is shot to hell, it's made it impossible to examine complete stranger's pasts."

"So a common link between all the original infected could help figure out what caused it? How do they determine who the original carriers were?" I asked.

"Now that is something I don't know. Apparently, there's a marker in the Z's blood that they're attempting to use as a timeline. I don't know how successful they are."

"How are they getting blood samples?" It was only the next logical question.

"Beats me," Sora said and he looked back over his shoulder at me. In that second, I saw something move in the shadows and I grabbed him by the shirt and hauled him back next to me, sword poised in the air.

"Thought I saw something move..." I muttered and then I heard shuffling.

A zombie appeared around the corner and he looked like he was having a hard time putting one foot in front of another. He only had one arm, the other was a bloody stump that was dripping on the floor. He saw us a few feet away and attempted to make a mad dash towards us but ended up impaling himself on my sword instead. He sagged down on the blade as whatever kept his body going gave up the ghost. I tipped my sword and he slid off it and landed with a wet thunk. A quick slash and his head was separated from his body. A closer examination showed me that it looked like something sharp had taken off the zombie's arm.

Sora stepped forward and kicked the body before sheepishly looking up at me. "Sorry, bad habit. The first couple that I killed before I set up security around the shop had a nasty habit of coming back for their pound of flesh."

I just motioned for him to keep moving. He took the lead again and we left the zombie lying in a pool of blood that quickly stained his scrubs and began to coagulate. A couple more feet and a corner and Sora told me I was at the halfway point.

"I'll be in that room," He said, pointed to a door at the end of the hallway. It was dark, there was no light coming through the blinds that covered the window. "Give me five minutes before you leave. If I haven't come out by then, chances are that I won't be in good shape. I'll whistle if I need you and vice versa." He jogged off down the end of the hallway and I glanced down at my watch listlessly.

It was going to be a long five minutes.

I walked around the corner and back again so that I could keep an eye on both doors. It was quiet except for the faint noises I heard from the other side of the door Sora had disappeared behind. A door that was locked with a card swipe and a sign next to it that said, 'Authorized personnel only'. Squall must have had high enough clearance to get a card for that door.

Suddenly, from behind another door I heard the sounds of glass breaking and snarling. I glanced wildly at the door Sora was locked behind and pressed my ear to the door with the noise. I jerked my head back in surprise when something smashed the other side of the door with bone-jarring strength. Then Sora was there and he grabbed my hand, flying down the hallway with me in tow. We burst out into the sunlight as the zombies smashed through the door behind us. Sora put on an extra burst of speed and we left the darkness of the hospital hallway behind us for the sunlight of the early morning.

Sora dropped my hand and turned to slam the door shut in the zombies' faces. I don't know how many of them there were but there were enough that I didn't feel safe with just a metal door between us and the horde. I kept running for truck and Axel reached over to throw the door open for me. I jumped in, tossing my sword in to the cab behind us.

"Fuck! Hurry it up—they're coming!" Axel yelled to Sora and I turned around to see at least twenty zombies running towards us from the front of the building. Sora was busy stringing a heavy chain and padlock around the backdoor.

"Sora! There are more coming!" I yelled and Sora looked up. He cursed loudly when he saw the mob heading for him. He started towards us but then went back for the duffle bag he had left behind. "Run!" I yelled. "Run!"

Sora sprinted for the truck and tossed the bag into my lap. "Drive, dammit, drive!" He yelled as he tried to swing himself into the truck. One of the fresher and quicker looking zombies had caught up to him though and it tried to drag him out the cab of the truck before Sora could get settled.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." I chanted out-loud as I grabbed onto Sora's shirt again and engaged in a tug of war with the zombie hanging off him. I could feel the seams of his old shirt ripping as two forces tugged on it. I tried to adjust my hold on him and grabbed him around the shoulders so that I was attempting to force him into the seat I had just vacated. Crouching over the seat, I was suddenly face to face with the zombie that had dug its nails into Sora. Somewhere, in the distance, I could hear Axel and Sora screaming. I punched the zombie hard in the face as it bared its teeth at me and in response it lifted one of its hands, grabbed something from its pocket and slashed me across the face.

With a roar of pain, I lashed out and punched the zombie again and with only one hand sunk into Sora's flesh, I was able to knock the zombie free of Sora. I hauled Sora in by the belt-loops on the back of his pants and slammed the door shut behind him. We sat there breathing heavily against one another as Axel careened down the road at breakneck speeds.

Sora took a deep shaky breath. He looked over at me and his eyes were grateful. "You saved my li-" He attempted to say but the shattering of glass broke into his statement. A hand reached through the back window of the cab and attempted to grab me by the hair. Axel took one look in the rearview mirror, slammed on the brakes and whipped around with my dad's handgun. Three quick squeezes and he turned around, driving off as the zombie's body fell out of the back of the bed of the truck and was left in the road behind us.

"Holy fuck." Sora said.

All I could do now was agree and I nodded my head slowly—still trying to catch my breath and piece together everything that had just happened. I looked down at the bag between my legs. A drop of blood falling on the bag distracted me though and in a daze I looked up and leaned back against the seat, crushing Sora's legs. It was strange, I could hear a roaring noise all around me and it took a few seconds before I realized that Sora was calling my name.

"Motherfucker." Sora swore as he looked at me. "Axel you'd better fucking step on it—he needs help bad."

Confused, I looked up at Sora about to ask him what was wrong when he took his shirt off with a wince and pressed the clothing to my face. I was about to complain but I was suddenly overwhelmed with the spicy smell of Sora. I breathed the scent in deeply and tried to ignore the stink of copper filling my nose.

The drive back to the shop didn't seem to take as long as the drive to the hospital but by then my face had started throbbing something fierce. Axel must have pulled up to the shop because he hit the brakes and quickly turned the truck off. He jumped and threw open the door helping Sora orient me enough so that I could get my legs underneath me when I slid off the seat. Together they guided me into the building as Sora kept his shirt pressed to my face.

I tripped going up the stairs and Sora steadied me. I could feel the lean muscles of his chest straining to keep my heavier body upright. I still had one hand gripping the bag tightly and as the pulled me down the hallway, it scrapped along with wall.

Footsteps came running up to us. "What happened?" I heard Kairi ask.

"Slashed across the face by a Z. Get Squall, Selphie." Sora grunted out. Kairi gasped. They half-guided me half-dragged me to the desk in the center of the shop. I heard crashing noises as whatever was on the desk was unceremoniously removed and I was placed on top of it.

"He wasn't bitten was he?" Squall asked from my side. I lifted attempt to lift the shirt to speak by Sora kept the shirt pressed to my face.

"No—just scratched. It's pretty bad." Sora said.

"Here give this to me," Kairi muttered from beside me as she tried to remove the bag from my hand.

The shirt was removed from my face and a blinding light was switched on that seared my eyes. I groaned in response. "Shh, shh, don't move let me look." Squall said as he leaned over me. Cold metal probed at my face and I moaned as even that slight touch made my nerves flare. "Selphie please go get me that bottle of Jack from Dad's safe.

A few seconds later she was back and a bottle was put to my lips. "Drink deeply," Squall commanded me and I took a deep drag and almost chocked when I realized I was drinking whiskey. I tried to spit it out but a hand was placed over my mouth.

"You'd better drink—this is going to hurt like a motherfucker." Sora's voice rang out and I swallowed my mouthful. I opened my mouth to gasp and another mouthful was poured down my throat. Obediently, I swallowed even as my stomach roiled and raged against me. Someone grabbed my hand and squeezed it—it was a slender female hand—Kairi's hand.

"One last drink." Sora coaxed and reluctantly I took one last swallow before the bottle was removed from my lips.

"Sora, I find it hard to believe that fingernails did this." Squall's rumbling baritone rang out.

"Did I ever say it was fingernails? It was some fucking metal surgical equipment or some shit. I have no fucking clue what you call it!" Sora yelled, frustrated.

The probing on my face stopped. "It used something to attack Riku?" Squall asked, his voice like steel.

"Yes."

Squall swore. "He's going to need some stitches for this. Everyone get out of my light unless you know what you're doing." He bit out. "Now."

"I—I've done stitches before." Axel said.

"Alright, you're assisting—everyone else, grab his legs and arms." Squall directed.

The pain in my face was blinding but the fogginess growing in my mind helped to assuage that until I felt a new—sharper pain in my face. I cried out and jerked my arms. Someone was attempting to pin them down but they were strong enough and I broke free of them.

"Hold him down!" Squall yelled and suddenly there was a heavy weight across my chest, pinning my arms to the desk. More weight was added on to my legs and I was rendered pretty much immobile. "Please, Riku. I need you to stay still so I can sew your face back up. You've got some loose flaps of skin and if you don't want to end up looking like the fucking Phantom of the Opera, you need to lay still." Squall gritted out between clenched teeth.

Someone was brushing the blood off of my eyes and I opened them to see Axel and Squall's faces tinted pink from the blood still in my eyes. I closed them tightly to protect against the stinging sensation. "Come on Riku, Squall will fix that face of yours." Sora's twang rang out and I focused on that as Squall cleaned out my face.

"Hold your breath Riku and cover his eyes for him Axel." Squall commanded as he dumped what felt like an entire bottle of hydrogen peroxide on my face. I could feel the chemicals bubbling in my face. "God only knows what the fuck did this. So I'm going to make absolutely certain that you don't get an infection." I felt him pour something else on my face and it smelled very pungent. It burned the insides of my nostrils.

"I'm going to start suturing now. Please stay still. Axel hold this."

The next ten minutes were pure hell. I tried my hardest not to move or cry out each time the needle puncture my face. I could hear the sound of the needle singing through my skin and feel the pull of my flesh. Every movement Squall made seemed to send fire coursing over my face. And then it was over. I was shivering and covered in cold sweat. There was no more weight pressing my limbs down, instead there was the comforting feeling of a blanket being laid over me. I closed my eyes and didn't open them for a while.

I struggled to open my eyes for few seconds before they became unglued. It was dark out now and the soft light was soothing on my eyes. I didn't want to be in the dark anymore after this morning—especially not alone. Even though that was silly—neither darkness nor light had any effect on zombies. The throbbing in my face reminded me of the pain I had been trying to forget. It was almost mind numbing the intestity of each pulse across my face. But the fact that I could feel anything at all was good enough for me.

The only thing I really had on my mind was getting a glass of ice cold water. My mouth was as dry as all hell and I attempted to moisten it with my tongue but it felt like sandpaper rasping along my teeth. Gingerly, I stood up, using the wall as a crutch. My head spun for a few seconds and I breathed shallowly to keep my stomach from rebelling. When everything had settled back down, I slowly made my way down the stairs to the shop. It was slow going but I could feel myself growing stronger with each step and more aware of the pain in my face.

At the bottom of the stairs, I caught sight of Selphie, her brightly colored jumper gave her away. She ran up the stairs to me and placed one of my arms around her shoulder. "Come on now, take it easy—you're probably starving to death big guy. I saw the way you were eating at breakfast." She joked lightly but I could hear her grunt as she attempted to support my weight as we went down the stairs.

Eventually she settled me down at the crappy little table we had eaten breakfast at. "What's up Riku? How are you feeling?" She asked me, her voice concerned. She'd lost her youth sometime since this morning when she had been arguing about something stupid with Axel. Attending to me like a nurse, Selphie set me up with a glass of cold tap water before going to tell her brother that I was awake. I drank deeply and drained the cup before Selphie returned with Squall.

Selphie ran off again and promised to return with some food for me. "Fill him up another glass of water, will you, Selph?" Squall called out. "Now Riku, how are you feeling?"

"Like shit," I mumbled out.

"I can imagine. You got almost thirty sutures put in your face. You'll have some scarring but I'm pretty good at suturing so it won't be too bad. Besides—your hair will probably cover most of it." Squall replied, peering at his handiwork. "Do you know what the zombie hit you with?"

I shrugged, "I just remember seeing something silver in its hand. I barely even felt it when the zombie slashed me."

"Adrenalin can be a wonderful thing." He quipped dryly. "Now you are going to be sore as fuck for a few days and there will be a little bruising but I'm trying to keep that down." He handed me an ice-pack that I pressed gently to my face.

"Are you going to have to take the stitches out?" I asked hesitantly, not willing to go through all that pain again.

"Yes, they'll have to come out in about a week but the internal ones will dissolve on their own. Stitches without any anestheisia is pretty badass, you know." Squall said.

I grimaced a smile at him, remembering the stitches Axel had put in Namine. She had taken those stitches better than I had. Squall mistook my grimace for pain and dug something out of his pocket.

"Here, take some of these. We don't have too many."

"What is it?"

"Think of it as an extra strength Tylenol." He replied.

"We have some heavy duty pain killers in the truck."

"Pills that cloud your mind and dull your senses. Not the smartest thing to take in a world overrun with zombies. Trust me. You're better off with a bit of the pain—it'll keep you in touch with this shit hole around you." He waved me off with a flippant hand.

"Just what I wanted—to be aware of the hell around me." I gripped.

Squall just smirked at me and told me to take it easy, if I pulled any of my stitches I'd end up with worse scarring than I was already supposed to have.

Scars didn't really mean too much to me. I have had scars all my life—lacrosse is a very unforgiving sport, especially when played without padding on the asphalt. Besides, I wasn't looking to win any beauty contests. I was just eager to find my parents. I still felt uneasy being here; they were hiding something from us and I didn't know what it just yet. Selphie came back with a bowl of soup for me. She handed me a spoon and a napkin and gave me a smile before flouncing off to do something else. Suddenly ravenous, I dug into the soup like a man starved.

Squall raised an eyebrow at me. "You certainly eat a lot."

"I work out a lot—I worked out a lot. Did a lot of sports, burned a lot of calories, got a quick metabolism. I'm just a growing boy you know."

"And your butchery of our beautiful English language would make any educated person cringe." He said, crossing his legs and leaning back to watch me with a look of amusement on his face. Or maybe it was disgust. I didn't care, the chicken soup tasted like sodium-infested heaven.

"Where's everyone else?" I mumbled around a mouthful of chicken.

"Up on the roof actually. Sora likes to go up there to keep a watch and he took your friends up there with him. Kairi was wearing out the floor with all her pacing and Axel needed a smoke.

I stayed with Squall a little longer before cleaning up my dishes and heading up to the roof with Squall's explicit directions. Once again, there was an emphasis to stay out of the basement. Why wouldn't it be safe if there was a fucking electric fence surrounding the back of the shop? What was down there that they thought was so dangerous? I gave the basement door a suspicious glare before I continued up to the roof.

"Ah, Sleeping Beauty, you've awoken. And who gave you true love's first kiss?" Axel greeted me.

"Oh didn't you hear? It was Bob, the zombie boy down the street." I replied with equal sarcasm.

Kairi threw herself at me and was squeezing me tightly around the middle. "Oh my gosh! Riku—you came in here bleeding all over the place! I didn't know what to do...I didn't know what to think...All that worrying—I should have known you'd be fine, you jerk!" She smacked me on the arm and rubbed her eyes to rid herself of tears. "You worried me and Axel sick!"

I laughed. "I'm sorry, Kai. I didn't mean to worry you. Head wounds just like to bleed a lot."

"Oh is that all you have to say! You almost get yourself killed and it's just a head wound huh? I heard from Sora and Axel what happened." She put her hands on her hips and gave me a stern look.

"Come on, Kairi. Leave the conquering hero be. You know how it is with his type; everyone else comes first. The hero syndrome." Sora joked. My eyes snapped up to him as he talked and they meet his baby blues. Something about the way he looked at me took my breath away. But I remembered all the suspicious things I had been noticing and forced myself to look away from him.

"But seriously, Rambo. Take it easy next time. Don't use your face to beat off crazy cannibal zombies." Axel said, clapping an arm around my shoulder. His other hand entertained a cigarette that he took deep pulls on every so often.

"Those things will kill you, you know." I said gesturing to his cigarette.

"Touche."

Kairi lifted my hair up to take a good look at my injury. Her concerned eyes lingered over it before she let my hair drop back down. "You should take a shower—clean all the dried blood off and stuff. You don't want an infection."

"Heh, most of that stuff is iodine, Kai. It kills infections." Axel said from my left.

"Still—a hot shower would make you feel better. Come on, I'll help you clean your face." She insisted, pulling me back down the stairs. I gave the two guys left on the roof a salute as I let my small friend drag me off. "Apparently, this shop used to also be Sora's family home before his dad was born. The floor we've been sleeping on used to be where they lived. In fact, their grandparents lived there up until about five years ago when they got sick and passed away. So there's a little kitchen and bathroom in the corner—you probably never even saw them, they're really well hidden."

Kairi took me down a floor and showed me the inconspicuous doors that hid the kitchen and bathroom. "There's a bedroom on the other side of the floor but I think that's where Squall sleeps. I don't really want to get caught snooping in there, you know?"

I nodded in agreement. Kairi took out some towels for me to use and I started up the shower, adjusting the temperature until it was warm enough to just turn my skin pink. When she came back she helped me gently wash away the crud on my face. I watched a mixture of blood and iodine go down the drain. It was a light brown color. Eventually, Kairi decided that my face was as clean as it was going to get. She left me to shower by myself.

The warm water felt wonderful on my tired muscles. I had strained some of my shoulder muscles trying to pull Sora back into the truck and sleeping on them hadn't done me any good. Washing all the dirt off of me felt like I was washing away some of the more terrible memories of the past seventy-two hours. I savored that sensation until the water started to cool. After I figured out how to turn the water off, I patted my face dry softly and tied my towel around my waist. I stole some toothpaste and rubbed it on my teeth to get that icky feeling out of my mouth. My teeth felt like they were wearing fuzzy slippers. After gargling some water to rinse my mouth, I made the mistake of looking up.

My wet hair was plastered to my forehead allowing me to get a clear view of my forehead. Two angry red slashes marred the flesh of my forehead and cheek. The longest cut went from my hair line on the right side of my forehead to just under my eye on my left cheek. Luckily, my eye hadn't been harmed. The other cut was much shorter and higher up on the left side of my forehead. Leaning close to the mirror, I felt breathless. It was so much worse than what I had expected. I would most certainly have a scar but Squall was right, it would mostly be hidden by my hair. Seeing that bright red against the pale of my skin made suddenly aware of my mortality. I had come close to losing an eye and even worse—being bitten by one of those zombies.

Frighteningly, what worried me the most was the thought that Sora had almost been dragged out of truck and eaten.

I got dressed quickly in the clothes Kairi had laid out for me, eager to leave the mirror and my disturbing thoughts behind. I went back to where I had slept and took the bloody pillowcase off of my pillow. It was probably ruined but I went and tried to soak it in the bathroom sink anyway. My old dirty clothes were folded and put out of the way. Kairi had given me one of the shirts I had carelessly tossed into a bag when we had fled my house. The shirt was red with gold lettering—my school colors—with a Native American playing lacrosse underneath our school name. On the back were the dates of our games a few seasons ago. The shirt was from my freshman year and the cotton was worn to the point where it felt as soft as silk. I remembered that season fondly; I was the only freshman on the varsity team. How strange that less than a week ago I was looking forward to my senior year lacrosse season.

There were voices outside of the window next to my makeshift bed and I looked out to see Kairi and Axel unloading some stuff from the truck. Seeing them at the truck reminded me of my ultimate goal—to find my parents. I had given my phone to Sora to charge the other day and had yet to get it back. I figured that he had left it charging in the office and went to search for it. I wasn't sure where everyone else was—I didn't see anyone on my way down to the office. Finding my phone didn't take me long, it was on the desk, fully charged. Resting, waiting for me.

Underneath my phone was a yellow legal pad that had very slanted handwriting on it. The letters were so thin and cramped together that I had trouble making out where one word ended and another began. I began to be able to pick out a few words and soon I realized I was looking at Squall's notes on the zombies. There were pages upon pages of them—the entire legal pad was almost full. He must have been writing for hours on end. I picked up the pad to get a closer look and a paper fell out. It had a bunch of times on it and some basic notes.

_Healthy male aged 30, 5 foot 10, 160 lbs_

_1 hr – normal RBC shape, concave, enucleated_

_1.5 hrs – normal as before_

_2 hrs – one or two RBCs appear to have 'shrivelled'_

_2.5 hrs – half of RBCs shrivelled_

_3 hrs – all RBCs shrivelled._

What was all of this? What did it mean? What was an 'RBC'? I stuffed the paper back into the legal pad and picked up my cellphone. It had about two bars of service and one missed call. They had left a voice message. I quickly retrieved the voice message from the unknown caller, my heart pounding.

"Riku? It's Mom. We're at your Aunt's house and everyone is fine. We're safe here for now—but please Riku—be OK. I don't know where you are and I don't know how you're doing but I made your father drive me some place that we could get service. Honey, I hear that almost every major city is completely overrun. Please, find somewhere safe to go and hole up there! I can't lose you sweetheart. I love you and be safe." She whispered that last part but I heard it clear as day. I listened to that message three more times just to hear the sound of my mother's voice.

She was alive. They were both alive. I could feel the tension drain from my body—all the baggage I had been carrying had just become infinitely lighter. Alive! I still had them. It made this bleak world a little bit easier to deal with. I gave them a call back and left them a voice message telling them where I was and that I was OK. I could hear the tired relief in my own voice.

Still ecstatic with the good news, I ran out to tell Kairi and Axel. I found them out front arguing about the easiest way to carry everything in. Axel wanted to shove the guns in the sleeping bag and carry them in that way and Kairi thought that it wasn't a smart idea to be manhandling loaded guns that neither one of them knew very much about. I had to agree with Kairi. I reached between the two of them and picked up a gun. After a few seconds I was able to switch the safety on and placed it back into the truck.

"You guys need a lesson on gun safety," was how I greeted them.

"Wow Riku, it's amazing how cleaning the dirt off your face makes you look so different!" Kairi exclaimed, clearly noticing I was happy and not understanding why.

"I got a message from my parents telling me that they're OK!" I burst out, unable to keep the happy news to myself.

Kairi threw her arms around me and squeezed me tightly. "I'm so happy for you!" There were tears in her eyes and I think she was remembering her adoptive parents but they weren't tears of sadness.

Axel clapped me on the back. "That's awesome man. I knew your parents were like cyborgs from the future or something." He grinned showing all his teeth and then leaned in close to both me and Kairi. "I've been hearing noises from the basement." He said quietly.

I turned my head to look at him and he was staring directly at one of the cameras that Sora's family used to survey their land.

"What kind of noises?" I asked.

"Scrapping shuffling noises when everyone else is supposed to be asleep."

"Maybe it's an animal." Kairi suggested.

"I don't think so Kai, they've got an electric fence surrounding the place. Kinda hard for an animal to get around that." I replied.

"Electric fence, huh. Would have been nice if they told us about it." Axel said, his face hardening.

"Maybe it's just an old building. You know maybe it's just making creaking noises." Kairi desperately supplied.

Axel grabbed her by the shoulders and steered her around so that he was staring directly into her eyes. Granted, he had to bend down almost in half for them to be eye level. "Kai, baby, I know how bad you want things to be right and normal but that doesn't mean you should turn your head away from everything. You can't ignore what's staring us in the face. They have secrets—a huge secret and I guarantee that it has something to do with that basement."

"But why wouldn't they tell us?" She whispered, her eyes filled with tears.

"What ever it is must be bad—real bad. Bad enough that it makes them not tell us about an electric fence." Axel said.

I shouldered the bag Kairi was carrying. "You ever think that maybe that fence was meant to keep something in?"

"Like something that makes loud noises and is locked in the basement? The basement we've been warned to never go near how many times?" Axel replied.

"I over heard Selphie crying the other night while she was talking to Squall. I couldn't really hear what was the problem but they kept pointing at the basement door..." Kairi whispered.

"God. What the fuck is in that basement?" Axel asked, rubbing his head.

"Something horrible." Kairi whispered. "Maybe we should do nothing... maybe what ever it is they've got it handled."

I shook my head and grabbed a gun from the back seat. "We have to check. Tonight—we have to get in the basement."

"I thought you'd say that." Axel had a devilish smirk on his face. Now here's what we do. I'm on watch at around 3 am tonight. Everyone's usually asleep by then but sometimes Squall stays up and studies in the office. Some one will need to distract him if he's up—that'll be your job Kairi. And Riku can go down into the basement."

"Thanks for volunteering me." I replied.

"You're welcome, pretty boy." Axel said.

"I have a terrible feeling about this," Kairi mumbled. I could barely see her in the darkness on the roof but occasionally I could catch the glint of her teeth in the dark.

"We can take them," Axel replied.

"That's not what I'm worried about."

"Alright, Kairi, you head on down, make sure everyone's still asleep then I'm gonna find a way into that basement." I said, looking down the side of the building.

"But how are you going to get in, the basement door is dead locked." Kairi said as she started towards the stairs.

"That's what the bolt cutters are for." I replied as I stepped backwards off the roof and landed lightly in the dumpster below. "Whistle like we practiced if something comes up." Axel shot me the thumbs up and then disappeared further back onto the roof.

I climbed out of the dumpster as quietly as I could while moving quickly. I had thought I'd seen an underground entrance to the basement the other night when I'd been up on the roof. I just had to hope I hadn't been seeing things or else I would have to break into through a window and that would cause a lot of noise. But I was in luck and my eyes hadn't been deceiving me. There was an entrance that was chained closed with a padlock but the bolt cutter sliced right though the heavy padlock.

The bolt cutter made a sharp clack and I froze, poised to run but there was still silence. There was nothing to hear other than my heavy breathing and a small scratching noise coming from the other side of the basement doors. I eased the door open and luckily the hinges were oiled well enough that it barely made a creak. Inside it was pitch black and I took a flashlight out of my front pocket and flicked it on.

There was a lot of clutter in this part of the basement—old rusting metal hunks but further away I could see empty space and that was where I worked myself towards. In the center of the clearing was a wooden chair with someone sitting in it slumped over.

"Hello?" I whispered. There was no response. "Hello." I tried louder. Still nothing. I stepped forward and touched the person on the shoulder and it was then that I realized I was standing in a dark pool of blood.

The person sitting in the chair leaned their head back and I found myself staring into eyes that were almost identical to Sora's. A beautiful breathtaking blue.

"What the hell." I whispered. I walked around so that I could see the person's face and realized that they were tied down. Their wrists were bound to the arms of the chair and their legs were tied down. Duct tape covered there mouth. I looked up at this person, trying to figure out what I was seeing when cold realization hit me.

The person in the chair in front of me was matted with blood and they stared at me with dead, almost vacant eyes. But I'd recognize those eyes anywhere. Hell, I'd been dreaming about them.

"Sora," I whispered and his eyes dilated and then focused on me, piercing right through.

End Chapter 4

Author's Note – Well hopefully you guys enjoy this chapter. I got a few requests to add other people to the story but I'm trying to keep my characters to a minimum- makes it easier to stay true to my story. And an extra special thanks to ethickca! You helped me out a lot!


	5. Chapter 5

The Resolute

Chapter 5

Author's Note – If you haven't been offended by this story yet, chances are this one won't send you over the edge.

I couldn't help myself, I reached towards him and touched his check. This sent him into a bad frenzy as he screamed at me through the gag and tried desperately to free himself. His fingers gripped the arms of the chair and I could see blood dripping down from underneath his hands.

If I'd had any doubt what was wrong with him it was gone now. This wasn't a normal reaction. Just to check, I hooked one finger under his gag and pulled down; the only thing this revealed was the hungry moaning of the damned. As I replaced his gag, Sora attempted to bite me but I was expecting this.

What I wasn't expecting was the strange keening noise coming from my throat or the tears that burned my eyes. I stumbled backwards to escape the pool of blood surrounding Sora and judging by the stains on his shirt it looked like he'd been vomiting blood up before the gag was instituted. How long had he been like this, tied up and gagged in this dirty basement? What was happening?

I wasn't sure how long I'd been down in this basement—probably less than two minutes—but I didn't want to risk Selphie or Squall finding me down here.

Yet I couldn't leave until I knew what they were doing down here. Spotting a table behind Sora, I quickly walked over and began riffling through papers—most of them were read-outs from high-tech instruments that I couldn't even begin to understand. Five pages had huge graphs on them with crazy spikes that made no sense—something about absorbance percentage. I ignored these and picked up another page that had words written on them that I could understand. Erythrocytes, lymphocytes, neutrophils—these were cells in blood, something I remember from AP Biology last year. Taking my cell phone out, I quickly snapped a picture and then readjusted the papers, making it look like I'd never been there.

Then I saw another laptop humming away in the corner—this one was sleek and modern with an external hard drive attached. Maybe if I was lucky, I'd be able to find something on here. When I touched the trackpad, the machine hummed in response and the screen lit up like the sun. Cringing, I squinted my eyes at the screen trying to read as my eyes teared from the sudden light. There was a document saved to the desktop that I selected to open—not sure where to start.

Somehow luck was on my side and I opened up what looked like Squall's notes on Sora's transformation. I could feel bile rising in my throat as I quickly read through a list of the symptoms that had overcome Sora earlier tonight.

_7:00 PM – injected, normal function and performance, normal cognitive results_

_7:30 PM – increased temperature and sweating_

_7:45 PM – Stomach pains and hunger_

_9:00 PM – Pupils dilated and breathing increased, elevated blood pressure_

_9:10 PM – Subject secured with usual restraints, still scoring well in cognitive tests_

_9:30 PM – Delirium sets in, cognition significantly decreased, vomiting starts_

_9:37 PM – Loss of speech_

_9:44 PM – Loss of upper brain function, vomiting stops_

_10:44 PM – No change, subject chewing on lips_

_11:44 PM – No change_

_12:44 AM – No Change_

_1:44 AM – Heart beat slowing down_

_2:44 AM – Heart beat returning to normal, lower blood pressure_

I glanced at the clock and swallowed and curse, it was 3:37 AM and Squall was probably going to be in here any minute to check up on Sora again. Quickly, I closed the document and put the computer to sleep. Sora was still watching me with vacant eyes; his moaning muffled by the gag on his mouth. I snuck past him and opened the door that led to the outside. Once out, I rearranged the lock so that it could still secure the door before I headed back towards the dumpster. I flicked my flashlight on and off twice to let Kairi and Axel know that I was out and then I pulled myself up onto the dumpster with a quiet grunt.

Above me I could see Axel dangling his hand down for me to grasp. Grateful, I took it and he gave me the moment to easily pull myself up. Up there, surrounded by my friends, I was suddenly aware of how cold I was in the hot night. My shirt clung to my skin thanks to the cold sweat that was giving me cause to shiver. Kairi started talking to me but I couldn't hear her over the roaring in my ears until Axel started shaking my shoulder.

"Yo! Riku! Tell us what you saw dude." Axel said.

That snapped me out of my daze and I stared at the two, trying to convince my mouth to move even though my tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth. "I—I—Sora..." I said and I staggered over to the doorway and used the wall to prop myself up.

"What about Sora?" Kairi asked, her big eyes frightened.

"He's down there and he's... he's... a fucking zombie, Kai. The son of a bitch injected his own brother and turned him into one of those things." I clutched at my head wanting to pull my hair out just to make sure this was all real.

"What?" Kairi said, faintly as she slid down the wall next to me. "Are you sure?"

I nodded my head and she started crying, softly at first and then big heaving sobs. Axel sat down opposite us, knees jammed up under his chin.

"He had notes and everything on it—like he'd been planning on this." I continued. "There was a pool of blood surrounding him..."

"We have to leave," Axel said, clutching both mine and Kairi's arms so hard that it hurt. Kairi whimpered and Axel loosened his grip a bit but he didn't stop talking. "We have to go now—Christ, if he'd turn his own brother, he'd turn us in a fucking heart beat! I can't believe he didn't try to turn us quicker! Never did like scientists..."

Axel kept going on but I tuned him out as a roaring tide rose inside my head, blocking all sound. The feral look in Sora's eye was the only thing running through my mind. Never had someone I'd known look so feral. I swallowed hard and lurched to my feet, dragging Kairi up with me.

"No! We can't leave we'd have no where to go!" Kairi wailed. "We were so set on getting here.. it was supposed to be safe... and now..." I grabbed Kairi to me and crushed her in a hug as she started sobbing into my shirt.

She was right, I'd promised them that we'd be safe here and now we were going to be used as a science experiment. It was enough to make me sick. We sat up there together till the sun rose planning and talking about days gone by. Simpler days. Days I longed for.

We took turns on watch but I barely grabbed more than a few minutes of sleep. As the sun rose up, I gently shifted out from under Kairi and went inside. I left Axel smoking cigarette after cigarette and flicking the ashes over the side of the roof. I just couldn't sit there anymore and do nothing. Instead, I moved quietly around trying to gather up some of our things without waking up Selphie. She snored lightly on the couch and didn't stir even when I dropped a gun magazine.

I stared at my tired face in the bathroom mirror and wondered when the grey bags had permanently made a home under my eyes. My hair hung limp against one side of my head where I'd been slipping on it and rustled it back into shape with my fingers. Yet I still wasn't used to the figure I saw in the mirror—when had I aged? When had these worry lines appeared between my eyebrows? I shook my head to clear my mind of these self-depreciating thoughts when I caught sight of the ugly red puckering near my hairline from the cut I'd gotten.

That sent another chill down my back and I instinctively clenched my stomach against the rising feeling of horror. I wanted Kairi and Axel to go back out there into a fucking war zone where the things hunting us were proving smarter than I had ever thought. Zombies weren't supposed to be intelligent. They couldn't set traps or use weapons. But they were.

Nothing was familiar, nothing made sense. Brothers were supposed to love one another—not use one another as part of a twisted science experiment. The room spun around me and I leaned by greasy forehead against the mirror. A deep shuddering breath and I was squaring my shoulders, readying myself to go back out and face my friends. I had to be tough. I had to be a man when I really just wanted to run.

I swung the bathroom door open and on the other side was Squall leaning back against the wall. He made a big show of looking at his watch.

"A little early to be up, don't you think?" He stared at me over his black rimmed glasses. "Where are you going?" He asked, inclining his head to indicate the bag I had started packing.

I looked at him, my expression guarded. "We think that we may have overstayed our welcome a little. Don't want to wear out your hospitality." I looped my thumbs into my pants and gave Squall my best squinty-eyed stare. So maybe I've seen too many Dirty Harry movies but who is tougher than Clint Eastwood?

Sadly, Squall didn't seem too scared of my act. "You've only been here a few days and you more than paid us back by saving Sora's life." Squall crossed his arms over his chest and stared down the bridge of his nose at me. "Kind of strange that you're packing up this early in the morning, what were you trying to skip out of town or something? You a wanted man, Riku?" He asked with a laugh.

He was joking with me. Joking.

After what he'd done, it was all I could do not to put my fist through his perfect teeth. "No, just think that maybe I should find my parents. I'm sure they're looking for me." I tried to walk past Squall but he grabbed my biceps in a vice-like grip. For a second, I was over come with the horrific thought that a zombie had latched its teeth into my flesh.

I stiffened and looked over my shoulder; when I attempted to pull my arm away he gripped tighter. I could probably pull away from him but at the moment my heart was beating loud enough to make its presence known to everyone within a mile radius.

"Did you think I wouldn't notice that the chain was cut?" He said, his voice deathly quiet.

"Did you think that I wouldn't notice how fucking suspicious this all is?" I leaned towards him and we were so close that I could feel his breath moving my hair.

Axel and Kairi chose this moment to join us and I could see Selphie stirring on the couch, awakened by all the people moving around. Axel saw Squall's grip on my arm and his hand gravitated to his waistband where there was a bulge that looked suspiciously like a guy. Kairi noticed us and her eyes widened a fraction. She clutched Axel's shirt for support before letting go and standing slightly behind him.

Squall leaned back away from me and dropped my arm before he leaned back wearily against the wall. "It wasn't what you thought."

"Bullshit!" I yelled and slammed my fist into the fall behind me, causing Kairi to jump. "You injected him with it you sick fuck! You killed him!"

"Killed who?"

I was so startled to hear that voice again that I couldn't stop myself from jerking around and my mouth from falling open. Standing there, looking just a little haggard was Sora. Quickly, my eyes scanned his and I searched for some sign that I wasn't just hallucinating.

"I told you it wasn't what it seemed." Squall said softly as he went over to stand by his brother.

"What the fuck is happening?" Axel breathed, never once did he or Kairi doubt my story, even now when Sora was here to refute it.

"I wasn't exactly truthful with you when I told you about my first zombie kill. Turns out, I wasn't as lucky as I said. Customer was in the middle of talking to me as I examined his Mustang's undercarriage, ended up turning and went for me. Gave me a really nasty bite on the calf, just missed an artery, and I should have been done for. But two hours later Squall found me passed out in a pool of vomit—for some reason I didn't turn. I'm immune or something. Go figure." Sora rubbed the back of his head and gave us all a sheepish grin.

"How?" Kairi peeped out.

Squall shrugged his shoulder. "That's what I've been trying to find out."

"So you just injected him without knowing if he would be alright the next time?" I asked, incredulously.

"See, that was the plan at first but Squall wasn't buying it. So I went behind his back and did it anyway. Chained myself up in the basement and told Selphie to not go in there no matter what she heard. Squall found me later and decided that he might as well make sure that I went about it the right way if I was going to be injecting myself." Sora replied.

"He didn't want to do it! Honestly!" Selphie broke in as she ran over to her brothers, burying her face in Squall's shirt as she started crying noisily. "They argued over it for so long..."

Sora at least had the ability to look ashamed when he made his little sister cry. "Squall had hit a wall with his research—he couldn't help anymore and we both knew he had the best lead sitting right next to him day after day."

"A-are you all immune?" Axel asked, looking visibly shaken. He looked like he'd seen a ghost and he hadn't even seen Sora when he was in the basement. I could only imagine what I looked like.

"You mean me and Selphie?" Squall shook his head. "For a while it looked like it when I ran blood tests but after a while our blood succumbed to the virus as well."

"Virus..." Kairi breathed.

"That's right. They don't appear to be any different from normal viruses but these do something I've never seen before. When the come in contact with our red blood cells—cells that normally carry oxygen—they latch onto the cells and change the cell's shape. These cells can no longer bind oxygen—only carbon dioxide and at the same time, these viruses invade every cell in the body and convert them to carbon dioxide dependencies. That's why there's a lag time between infection and the turning. The virus multiplies like crazy but it can take anywhere from a few minutes to hours before there are enough of them to take over a person—it depends upon their health. I saw a man almost bleed out completely before he was bitten and he turned thirty seconds after he was bitten—he was that close to death."

"If you know so much about it, why keep injecting Sora?" I asked.

"I'm testing the cure on him—or what I'm thinking maybe the cure. I'm still so far away from defeating this virus and immunizing people but somethings work better than others." Squall shot a sideways glance and his brother and his normally calm and collected features faded into a loving look. "What Sora has is an amazing gift to help people—he could be the only one in the world who is naturally immune."

"But why? Why is he immune?"

"That, Kairi, is the million dollar question." Sora butted in.

"And you can't test on animals?" She asked. That was Kairi, eventually she gets her shit together when she's done having a breakdown. I can't believe she hasn't permanently broken—soon I'm afraid neither Axel or me can put her back together.

"The virus doesn't recognize their red blood cells. You see every species and individual for that matter, has a unique marker in their body. All human red blood cells have a large part of this marker in common and the virus recognizes this marker. I would have tried it on primates but the virus ignores them as well. Sora is literally the only choice." Squall answered, leaning heavily against the wall. It struck me that he looked just as weary as me—if not more. I didn't have the life of the entire world resting on my shoulders; I just had the fate of my small group of friends weighing on me.

"But man, he's your brother! What if the next time you inject him, his body can't fight back? What if this shit mutates like all viruses do? What then? Are you going to risk losing him?" Axel retorted. He had pink splotches on his cheeks and Kairi tried to pat him reassuringly on the shoulder but he just shook it off.

"Dammit! Don't you think I know that? That this isn't something we've discussed over and over again?" Squall shot back, just as aggrevated.

"We argue about it every damn day." Sora replied, looking from his brother to Axel. "But arguing isn't going to bring back the dead or really get rid of the dead. We have to make the heavy decisions now, guys. Hell, we could all die in the next twenty-four hours. We all know that we're living on the goddamned-edge of a knife."

"It's just—he's… he's your brother man." Axel trailed off, no longer looking anyone in the eye.

"I know."

There was a pregnant silence. We all knew how morally wrong the experiment was but none of us could argue that it wasn't a necessary evil. The thought of Sora turning into a zombie each night made me sick to my stomach. "God, I risked my damn life for you back at the hospital. If that thing had bitten me, I'd be gone." I'd been so worried that he'd been bitten and it didn't even fucking matter. Our biggest fear when it came to zombies was turning into one and some how, Sora was safe from that horror.

"I know—I figured it'd be safe if I went further in. I…I figured that if things got hairy, that you would just leave…" Sora trailed off.

"Yeah but you didn't fucking count on inviting goddamn Superman to your house did you?" Axel asked, furious when he realized what Sora was saying. "Believe it or not, we're actually good people." He snarled.

Sora opened his mouth to reply but Kairi whispered something before he could speak.

"What was that?" I asked her, my brow furrowed.

"Do you hear that?" Her voice was a hushed whisper and she was gripping Axel's arm so tightly that I was afraid he might lose the limb.

"Hear what?" Squall asked.

It was the silent Selphie who replied, "Bells. I heard bells."

Sora spun on his heel and ran down the stairs, taking them two at a time. Squall was down right behind him but it took me and Axel a second to realize what the bells meant. The bells were a part of the defese system that Sora had set up. Tinkling bells meant someone or something was inside and had tripped the bells he had set up.

Axel pounded down the steps behind me, cursing under his breath and pulling Kairi along behind him. He pulled a hand gun from the small of his back and Kairi was desperately clutching a knife in her other hand.

I was weaponless so I spun back around and pushed passed them to get to where I'd left my own hand gun. My gun was where I'd left it and I picked up my sword too. It would be of no use to me in such close quarters but it had saved my ass too many times for me to just leave it behind. There was also the fact that it leant a reassuring weight to my side as I pushed it into its accustomed place.

I followed the shouts downstairs and towards the front of the building. There was a high inhuman scream as Kairi slammed her knife into a zombie that was reaching for her. Axel jumped back to her and used the butt of his hand gun to send the zombie crashing backwards. Kairi saw me coming and yell, "Don't shoot, the sound will carry!" I didn't question her statement so I pulled out my sword, not unsurprised that once again, it would come in handy. Kairi leaned forward and shoved her knife up to the hilt into the zombie's head and its teeth finally stopped gnashing.

I went past them, continuing into the garage. Another muffled yell lead me to Sora who was busy fighting off three zombies at once. He had his large wrench in one hand and a wickedly sharp knife in the other. A blow from the wrench sent one zombie stumbling into another and the knife dispatched the one while I dispatched the other with my sword. I had to yank the sword free since it had gotten caught in one of the zombie's vertebrae when I had attempted to behead it.

Sora nodded at me and motioned me to follow him deeper. I grunted an affirmative and allowed him to lead us deeper into the darkness. A shuffled footstep clued me in that there was another zombie coming up behind us and I swung my sword around in a blind 180, hoping to catch him. My sword connected with solid flesh and the zombie was armless; Sora moved in and rammed his knife right between the zombie's eyes. It fell like dead weight to the floor.

"How the fuck did they get in?!" Sora screamed at Squall who was beating a zombie's head in.

"Help Selphie!" Was Squall's only reply. I swung around until I saw Selphie cornered by two zombies. She had already dispatched a third but her tiny knife looked insignificant compared to the two zombies in front of her.

Sora ran forward and slammed his wrench into one of the zombie's gnashing teeth, Selphie took that time to jump up and sink her knife into the zombie's forehead. She hung there for a few seconds until the weight of her body dragged the knife back out. The zombie crashed forward into her but it had stopped moving. Axel then came up next to Sora and slammed his knife into the neck of the zombie with enough force to almost behead it.

Kairi and I pulled the zombie off of Kairi with only a little difficulty—it had been a large overweight man when it was alive—and Squall kept moving forward once he saw his sister was alright. Sora ran to join him and the four of us were left behind to clean up. Selphie suggested that we burn the bodies and none of us could think of a better way to dispose the bodies.

Leaving the zombies outside would attract scavengers and the rot would become overpowering. Plus, they might somehow attract other zombies. Actually, now that I think about it, zombies tended to ignore other zombies. They never attacked one another but they certainly attacked Sora. So I guess zombies didn't view Sora as one of them which was a relief.

We managed to drag the zombies to the back door but none of us wanted to go out when there could possibly be more out there. Selphie decided that we should all play it safe and she went to look at the security cameras. After five minutes she came back and said that the coast was clear. Selphie held the door open as the three of us dragged bodies out.

We piled them together like firewood.

"Anything here look really strange to you?" Axel asked. He crossed his arms in front of him and stood five feet away from the pile of bodies, just staring.

"Huh?" I replied, there didn't seem to be anything out of place about these zombies—I mean hell—they were zombies—what could be weirder than that? Using my foot, I rolled one's face over so that it was looking at me. It was a heavy woman with jowels that made her look like a bull dog. There was a wound on her head other than the one that Selphie had made. I looked over at another zombie but still noticed nothing strange.

Kairi was crouched on the other side of the pile and she was rubbing her hands on her shorts, as if trying to get something disgusting off of them. She looked vaguely nauseated and confused as her brows crinkled together. Selphie was standing a little bit away from us—she wanted to keep an eye out since her brothers weren't back.

"You mean other than the fact that these zombies managed to get in past all the precautions? I'd like to know how they managed to get so far past the security." I replied, cleaning some black blood off my sword with one of the zombie's shirts.

"It's lucky we installed those bells," Sora said as he and Squall came up behind us. "Let's drag these further away from the building and we'll burn them."

"Please just someone fucking look at them and tell me I'm wrong." Axel moaned as he grabbed his head between his hands.

"What is he talking about?" Squall asked me. I had no idea but Kairi replied.

"Just look at them." She said.

"What about them?" Sora ground out getting annoyed.

"They're fresh." Squall replied, looking them over.

"They're not just fresh," Kairi said softly and it dawned on me what she meant. I quickly moved to another of the zombies and flipped him over, another head wound—and not a wound inflicted by one of us. This zombie has its throat slashed by my sword, there was no reason for it to have a head wound.

Seeing what I was doing, Squall examined another and then another before he stood up with a curse. "They were _made_."

Sora had a confused look on his face, "What do you mean, _made_?"

"Made," I breathed looking at the series of shallow head wounds that went with bruises on the wrists. These zombies were made.

"Someone made them zombies on purpose." Axel said, slowly clapping. "It took you all long enough. Now, is it a little more obvious how they got in?"

Sora answered, not quite sure of himself, "Someone let them in?"

"But who would do that?" Selphie asked.

"Ding Ding Ding! Finally, you're asking the right questions. Who let them in and why?" Axel kicked a rock and it went pinging off the side of the building, a sound that echoed in our shocked silence.

"What the fuck?" Sora whispered. My sentiments exactly.

"Why? They probably want what we have here—safety, food, shelter." Kairi said with a shrug, she was sitting back on her heels with her arms wrapped around her legs. The knife was hanging limply in her hand like an afterthought.

Selphie moved closer to Squall and wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his shirt. That seemed to get him moving and he started to dish out instructions. "Sora, go reset the bells—bring Kairi with you. Riku, burn the bodies; Axel and Selphie—I want you on the roof keeping watch. I'm going to review the security cameras—maybe we caught them on tape." He detached himself from his sister and strode back into the garage without a glance back to even see if we were doing what he said.

We all looked around at each other but I couldn't think of anything to say. Sora handed me a pack of matches before he and Kairi disappeared around the front of the building. Axel put a reassuring hand on Selphie's shoulder before they left to go on the roof.

Then I was alone with just the pile of bodies. I remembered what Sora said about dragging them further away and I started to drag the heaviest body further away from the building. After five minutes, I managed to drag the body to the asphalt of the parking lot. I was covered in sweat and the sun seemed to be baking me. A dry wind came through that offered no relief from the heat. I tugged my shirt off, over my head and put in down on a half-dead bush.

Another five minutes and I dragged the heavy female zombie over. I'd never burned anything before other than a few matches but I had a pretty decent idea of how to make a campfire and I didn't think this would be much different. I grabbed a few branches from the bush to use as kindling and stripped off the green leaves. Then, the branches were added to my small pile of zombies.

Slowly, I dragged the remaining bodies over to the asphalt. Finally, all that was left was to start a fire. I tried to use one of the branches to get a flame started but it was still too green to catch right away. Apparently being half-dead wasn't dead enough for a fire to catch. Realizing that I was never going to get anything done this way, I headed back into the garage to look for some thing to use to help me get this fire going.

I was rummaging through a collection of jugs when Sora found me. "Looking for something?" He asked.

I jumped up immediately and swung around, not realizing someone had been so close behind me. "Oh uh…yeah, I was looking for gasoline or something to help me with …the…fire…" I trailed off stupidly, suddenly very self-conscious of the fact that I was shirtless. Sweat froze my body in the air conditioning.

"Oh, well these are all empty jugs. Gasoline isn't something we have too much of but we have a ton of motor oil—we had just gotten a large supply delivered before everything went to shit. That will go up in flash so keep clear when you first light it. Sora strode across the gym and starting tearing open some boxes. He tossed me two bottles of motor oil so suddenly that I didn't catch either one.

He laughed as I scrambled to pick them up. "And here I was thinking you were perfect at everything." I mock glared at him over my shoulder before going back outside to finish what I'd started. From on top of the roof Axel waved at me and I nodded back. I could just see the top of Selphie's head; she was facing the opposite direction.

My pile of bodies was right where I'd left them and as I dumped the bottle of motor oil out, I got the strangest feeling that someone was watching me. I turned around to look back at the roof but both Axel and Selphie were looking off in the opposite direction. A shivered started between my shoulder blades and ran its course down my spine. I grit my teeth and tried to go back to what I was doing while trying to peer around me.

I wasn't alone down here and I didn't want my watcher to know that I knew otherwise. I'd thought the place was pretty deserted out here but it really wasn't. There was a small tax place across the street and a real estate agent situated right next to it. Further down the street was a storage facility. There were places for people to hide all over. With a frown I struck the match and tossed it into the pile. The bodies went up like a funeral pyre.

For a second, I forgot that someone was watching me and I just started into the heat. It smelled almost like barbeque and I watched, horrified and entranced as the flesh crackled, fat dripped, and flames danced in front of me.

It was easy to forget for a while that those weren't bodies in there—that I was standing in front of a campfire, getting ready to roast marshmallows. I fed the fire a few more branches before I stepped back and let the blaze run its course.

I watched until the blaze died down to smoldering ash before I went inside.

The smell of tomato sauce and garlic greeted me indoors and I followed it to the source. Kairi and Sora were setting dinner on the table as I walked in and they both greeted me. Kairi smacked Axel's hand as he tried to reach in the bowl early.

"We were just about to come find you," Axel said to me as he nursed his left hand. I nodded and sat down next to him. "Bro, you smell like a goddamn campfire."

"Most morbid campfire I've ever seen." I replied before I guzzled half a water bottle that Sora had put before me.

"Oh good, you're all here." Squall said as he came in, a pair of glasses perched perilously on his nose and a stack of papers shoved under one arm.

Sora rolled his eyes, "Of course we're all here; it's dinner time."

Squall pointedly chose to ignore this bit of sarcasm and launched into a speech. "I'm glad you're all here—we need to discuss increasing our security. Sora has hopefully done as I've asked and restrung the bells, and while he was doing that, I set some extra trip wire that's attached to a car alarm mechanism. If it's tripped the noise will be awful so let's not sleep through that shall we? We're going to have two people on watch at all times—three hour shifts if you will—and both will be posted on opposite sides of the roof. I want rifles on you at all times if you're on watch and at least a knife with you the rest of the time."

"Did you see anything on the security cameras?" Sora asked hopefully.

"No, they managed to avoid the cameras for the most part and when they were in view their face was obscured. I couldn't even tell the gender or race." Squall said after a mouthful of spaghetti.

I twirled my fork around uselessly as I took in all the information. Squall seeing a hooded figure was the proverbial nail in the coffin. Someone was trying to kill us whether to get our supplies or not.

"How would they even know we were in here and in stable condition?" I asked.

Squall shrugged a shoulder, "We haven't exactly made it a secret that we're here and if they saw your trip, they might assume you came back with all kinds of supplies. Hell, they could've been watching us for much longer than that for all we know."

"This doesn't have anything to do with your research, does it?" Selphie asked cautiously.

"I don't know how it could—no one really knows about what I'm doing. The people who do are either here or locked up in some lab in New York. I think this is just a case of someone wanting what we have." Squall said.

"Oh come on man! These fuckers knew about your security measures. It's time to admit that. They've clearly been watching this place for a while—hell I'd even say before we arrived because they seemed to have this whole, "invade" the place down pretty damn well. We got lucky. That's all. We got lucky that they didn't realize that we'd even booby-trapped the inside of this place. Hell, they might have assumed we were all dead until you guys ran out the front door. We're damn lucky they attacked us while we were awake. Who knows whether or not people stationed on the roof would have realized what was happening before it was too late."

"Don't you think I know this?" Squall asked sharply.

"Well then why aren't you addressing the real issue?" Axel replied just as angry.

"And what issue is that?" Sora cut in.

"How do we stop them once they get in? Because it's not a matter of if they get in at this point—it's when. They've gotten in once and they'll do it again. We need to be ready for them or we'll be sitting ducks."

There was silence after Axel's announcement and I could see right awau that he was right. They were going to get in again—we couldn't tighten our security up enough to keep them away unless we redid the entire system and we just didn't have the time for that.

"I say we have to come up with something big by the time it gets dark or we'll be royally screwed." Axel replied.

"But what more can be done?" Kairi asked, terrified.

"We've found out that they can get up to the front door undetected so we might as well attempt to increase security outside but what we need to do is multiply it inside. We board up every window and door for starters." I said, helping myself to another plateful of spaghetti. Everyone else had stopped eating to discuss our options.

"We have some crates that we can break up and use as boards. We don't have an axe so we'll have to take them apart by hand. We do have hammers and nails." Sora said.

"Don't forget the basement." Selphie chimed in.

"Then as soon as we're done here, we'll begin." Squall declared.

I caught Axel and Kairi giving each other uneasy looks and I couldn't help but to agree. Somehow we'd gotten ourselves involved in something that could be more dangerous than zombies—jealous humans.

Humans could think their way past our defenses—hell, when these defenses had been laid down they were done so in the thought that the enemy would be a mindless eating machine, not an intelligent and thinking entity. This was something I was totally unprepared to face. Sure I'd played a few video games against other human players but still—they were confined to what the creators of the games said was possible. This—this was a fucking free for all.

We were fighting an invisible enemy of unknown number who clearly knew more about us then we did of him. Of all the times for me to not have my dad. That gave me an idea and I excused myself from the conversation to call my dad.

On the third ring my mother answered and said a choppy hello. "Oh Riku, how are you? Are you alright?" I reassured her that I was fine and that I was in a safe place before she finally put my dad on the line.

"Dad, this isn't something Mom should hear but I'm in deep shit over here." I said quickly after he greeted me with a husky growl.

"Figured at much, could tell just from the way your mother was talking to you. What's wrong?" That was my dad, to the point and down to business.

"There is someone trying to break into our base." Time to start talking in military jargon. "I need to know what to do. They got zombies in past our security without any of us noticing."

"What kind of security do you have?" My father cut in. I rattled off the changes that Squall and Sora had made to the place in a precise fashion.

My father made a humming noise when I was done and thought for a few seconds before he started giving me instructions. "Barricades and blockades—that's the key. Prevent them from getting in through the door and prevent them from getting to the door. Stay away from windows—block them as well—they may have a sniper. Make sure you're prepared to be settled down for a while; they may try to smoke you out. You know this stuff—I've told you about it over and over again."

"Yessir," I replied because I did remember all the stories he had told about digging ditches and filling them with spikes and mortar. We were in a fucking war against zombies and humans. This wasn't a fucking game anymore.

"Now—the connections breaking up or I'd tell you more. Call if you need us and think like a marine boy." He clicked off the phone after that.

When I entered back into the conversation, everyone was arguing back and forth over what they should be expected.

"Are you guys serious; why haven't you start blockading any of the doors?" I asked. They all looked up at me shocked that I'd yelled at them. I guess they hadn't realized how much time they were wasting but this was going to be the difference between life and death for us. "We need to get going. Sora and Axel—start chopping those crates up. Kairi and Selphie—nail the boards against every door and window. Squall—I need to know how much we have in terms of supplies." Everyone hesitated before I yelled again, then they got moving.

Squall led me to the back of the building where there was a garage door with a padlock and heavy chain. After producing a key from his pocket, Squall unlocked the door and heaved it up with a grunt. It had probably been a car dock before for some of the more valuables cars their shop had seen but now it was filled to the brim with cans and boxes of food. One entire wall was covered with bottles of water and there was a small stockpile of pharmaceuticals. I stared dumbfounded at the shear size of their catch. They must have spent days gathering it.

"Well it seems like we'll be fine in the event of a siege." I replied sarcastically, he just raised an eyebrow at me. "I need to get the rest of our stuff from the truck before it becomes almost impossible to get out."

"Ladder." He said.

"What?"

"Hmm? Oh, I just said we could use a ladder to get out from now on. If we barricade even the garage doors down." Squall looked completely unconcerned with the whole thing. I assumed it just wasn't in his nature to worry about such worldly things—he was too busy trying to figure out his brother's immunity to care for much else.

Squall and I were two very different people in that regard. His work was his passion and my passion was keeping people alive. Over the short time I'd been here, I'd come to realize that the one really calling the shots was Sora; he was the one in charge of their day-to-day activities and he took care of Selphie. Hell, Squall might not even it if Sora didn't make him anything.

I guess Sora and I have that in common; we're both in charge of other people. We never asked for this position of leadership, it just fell to us. This would probably be when my dad would start talking about rising to the occasion and thinking like a marine.

Well Dad, I'm thinking like a marine now.

I quickly walked over to the far part of the garage and lifted the four garage doors. There were a few rusty fenders tucked against one of the doors and I kicked them aside with barely a thought. Selphie poked her head back in to look at me, wondering what I was doing but I waved her off and she disappeared back into the depths of the garage. I fished the keys to the truck out of my front pocket and unlocked the driver's door. We had left some things in the truck when we'd first got here and while they weren't that useful, I knew that the truck itself was priceless—especially with what I intended it for. I drove the truck through the door on the far left and parked it up against the wall with the engine still running.

Then, I grabbed the keys to a minivan off of a metal hook. They had all the keys hanging on a board that was screwed into the wall. The minivan I knew was still out in front of the building along with an old Chevy pick-up and a Dodge Durango. I grabbed the other two keys and hoped there was still a breath of gas in the tank.

I was in luck and all three tanks had sufficient gas for me to maneuver them in front of the garage doors. It took a far amount of cursing but I managed to line the four vehicles up in front of the garage doors, creating a block incase the doors were compromised. From the outside of the building I closed and locked all the garage doors and pushed some empty oil drums in front for extra protection. As I was doing this, Sora came around the side of the building unrolling a large spool of twine that he kept wrapping around stakes he was driving into the ground. On close inspection, those stakes were various-sized screwdrivers.

"What are you doing?" I asked, curious.

"I could ask you the same." He replied without looking up. "I'm laying trip wire and attaching some bells to the end. We'll here if they trip it but they won't. I'm guessing you're locking the garage doors?"

"At this point I think they're our biggest and most obvious weak point." I replied as I moved the last oil drum into position.

"Fuck," He replied and kicked at a rock lying in his way. "I'm going to finish this up and then we're going to fortify the crap outta this place."

I grunted and watched him disappear around the other side of the building, still working at his spool. I stepped back from the doors so that I could get a view of what our enemies would see.

Enemies.

We had enemies. And our enemies weren't just zombies. None of it sat right in my stomach; I didn't want to even belief that there was someone trying to get us. It was hard enough trying to deal with the fact that zombies were trying to motherfucking eat us. And now I have to fight other humans? I threw my hands up in disgust and that's when our solution dawned on me.

There were boxes full of motor oil. Godamned crates of the stuff just lying in there. I rushed back inside, climbing around Kairi's wood pile as she attempted to board up a window. I think she tried to get my attention but since she was currently holding five nails in her mouth all that came out was a muffled sound. There was no time to stop—it was going to be dark out and then we'd be at the mercy of who ever was out there watching us.

I didn't know for sure if they'd decide to attack tonight, all I know is that we'd better be fucking ready if they decide to.

Sora was inside the garage sorting through a bunch of small boxes, looking for God-knows-what. I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him over to the stack of boxes containing the motor oil.

"This. This is what we're going to protect ourselves with. There's a ton of it and we're not doing anything with it."

"I'm not following you." Sora said, staring at me like I had suggested dancing naked under the moonlight.

"It's flammable. Highly flammable, useless to us, and there's a ton of it. So we fill up a few drums with the stuff and if we need to, we dump the barrels and light the shit on fire. Boom! They go right up in flames." I knew there was a feverish look in my eye right now because I could see it mirrored in his own.

"Boom." Sora replied; a vicious grin plastered to his face. "I'll help you bring out the boxes and then I'll set up a mechanism for knocking the drums over. They might get suspicious if the place was doused with oil so we'll have to hide it till the last minute. Hell we could boil the shit like they used to do in castles and dump it off the roof."

I laughed at that, "Let's not get too medieval now."

We took a few more minutes to laugh and then we started to execute our plan. I was finished with my part sooner than Sora was so I went to help the girls hammer down boards. By the time I got there, they were done with the first floor and had moved onto the top floor. Squall and Axel were securing the basement.

Nailing boards down was completely mindless work and I was able to hammer down ten boards without a thought running through my head. I just listened into Kairi and Selphie's mindless chatter. Selphie was asking Kairi about some boy she had one dated even though the red-head was turning a brighter color than her hair.

I laughed at the two of them and then Axel came storming upstairs. He flopped down next to me and started hammering as well but he was using about twice as much force as he should have.

"What bit your ass?" I asked in between the clang of hammering.

"Squall. He's holed in in the basement with his damn research and it doesn't look like he'll be coming out anytime soon. Really starting to piss me off with all this research crap. I swear he plans to spend the rest of the damn night pouring over nucleic acids or some shit. We need him up here helping us." Axel finished with a yelp as his hammer missed its target and hit his thumb. I winced in sympathy but the blow must not have been that bad since he went right back to hammering.

I understood completely what Axel meant. I'd noticed it myself earlier—Squall wasn't exactly all there.

"And that's another thing—his fucking doing this research on Sora. That's so beyond fucked up. It's his own brother!" Axel muttered to me so that Selphie wouldn't over hear us.

"Well Sora just injected himself when Squall refused to go along with it so I don't know how much of a choice Squall has."

"It's time for Squall to step up! He's at least five years older than us. Why are we the ones in charge?" Axel ground out.

"Some people aren't meant to be leaders." I supplied.

"Between you, me, and the wall, I'd pick you as our leader any day. Hey, I saw you talking on the phone earlier. Was that your dad?"

"Yeah, I was asking him what else we could do."

"Shit man, what I wouldn't give for your dad to be here."

"You and me both. He wasn't even able to tell me what to do. The connection was so choppy; I could barely hear every other word he said."

"God only knows how much longer the cellphones will even work."

"This is all so messed up," I replied.

Three hours later is was dark out and I was on watch duty with Selphie. I didn't exactly trust her on watch with anyone else—she was so young and she looked just about ready to drop. The poor girl was exhausted and it looked like fear had been the thing keeping her up late at night. She was positioned on the opposite side of the roof and was leaning against her gun, which was probably a very bad idea.

Sora came up and brought two cups of coffee with him. There was no milk to go with the coffee but there was cream and sugar, the latter of which was a main component in my cup. Silently, Sora handed the two of us our cups and Selphie quietly asked him if he could take her spot while she went to the bathroom. He agreed and he settled down in her recently vacated seat.

"How's it going downstairs," I asked, desperate to relieve the silence that had been laying over me like a blanket for the last thirty minutes.

"Kairi and Axel decided to get some sleep before there shift and I was about to call it a night when I figured you guys would probably like something warm."

He was right, with the sun's departure, the temperature had steadily dropped until my fingers started the get cold and I'd needed to grab a sweatshirt. The coffee was a welcome addition.

I was about to thank him for it to when the lights on the entire block went out.

End Part 5

Author's Note: As always, you know how you get more chapters—by harassing me within an inch of my life. Trust me, it works. I also feel it's only safe to tell you that I literally right this story by the seat of my pants. I have no idea where it is going when I start a chapter; I just let the story flow. That said, I had no idea when or how this story will end so ideas and suggestions are very much welcome.


End file.
